If you’re building imaging applications or adding imaging capabilities to your existing software, Accusoft Pegasus helps you deliver innovative solutions quickly. Accusoft Pegasus technology works reliably behind the scenes to deliver robust image capture, storage and viewing capabilities.

“Accusoft Pegasus is the expert in the imaging market,” said Tom Setzer, product group director at Accusoft Pegasus. “Our SDKs are used to build industry-leading document imaging, photo and healthcare applications worldwide.”

Using Accusoft Pegasus SDKs, developers can enhance their applications with barcode recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR) for hand printed characters, optical mark recognition (OMR), PDF support, and viewing of images and video. Accusoft Pegasus is also a leader in medical imaging with capabilities such as Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM), high-speed image compression and editing.

The technology supports multiple 32- and 64-bit platforms and development environments, including .NET, Silverlight, ASP.NET, ActiveX, Java, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and IBM AIX.

Accusoft Pegasus’ comprehensive portfolio of form-processing technologies and extensive complementary imaging toolkits moves developers closer to an end-to-end solution.

“We provide tremendous ease of use,” said Setzer. “Whether it’s our complete online documentation, the many use cases we cover in sample code, or our best-in-the-industry telephone and e-mail support, our job is to make our clients’ jobs easier.”

Take Forms Recognition to a New Level
Accusoft Pegasus’ FormSuite is a set of form processing components that are ideal for developers who need to support a structured forms-recognition step in a workflow. It includes OCR for recognizing electronically created type, ICR for recognizing hand-printed characters, and OMR for recognizing checkboxes and filled-in bubbles in tests and questionnaires. It also supports form recognition for applications in which multiple different forms might be processed in a single run, such as the various tax forms the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and individual states provide.

“Our technology recognizes the form type and pulls in the appropriate data from tax forms,” said Setzer. “The IRS uses our forms-processing technology to capture data from all U.S. corporate tax returns.”

FormSuite also includes ScanFix, an Accusoft Pegasus component that allows users to improve the quality of scanned document images by straightening (deskewing), removing specs (despeckling), cropping, removing hole-punches, and more. Image-enhancement processes such as this are critical to accurate content recognition.
Portions of Accusoft Pegasus forms-processing technology were used in the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census projects to help capture data from the forms each household completed. According to Setzer, the same technology will be used in the Canadian Census in 2011.

Accusoft Pegasus forms processing technology is also used by several medical software vendors to capture data from patient registration forms. When new patients enter a doctor’s office, they are typically required to fill out paper forms documenting their personal medical history, which are later scanned by the office staff. Using Accusoft Pegasus components, the applications are able to automatically identify each form and extract the hand-printed content for processing.

“Our forms processing technology allows medical record systems developers to focus on the business rules and data-processing aspects of medical records instead of having to learn about forms processing and handprint recognition,” said Setzer. “They rely on our expertise to work with the image so they can focus on their systems.”

Improve Business Process Efficiency with Barcodes
Barcoding significantly reduces the time and costs associated with forms processing. Accusoft Pegasus’ barcode recognition component, Barcode Xpress, enables developers to add accurate 1D or 2D barcode recognition to an imaging handling application in just a few lines of code. What’s more, applications built with Barcode Xpress can recognize barcodes on more than 1,000 images per minute, even if they are locating and decoding multiple barcodes on each page.

Organizations and individuals creating forms are recognizing the value of including barcodes on their forms to identify the form itself or the customer who is completing it. There are endless uses for barcodes, such as for auto-indexing, forms processing, inventory tracking, batch separation and more.

“Even though more documents than ever are being created digitally, paper is not going away,” said Setzer. “Paper may be required for compliance reasons, because it matches the desires of a target demographic, or to provide a form within another delivery vehicle such as a magazine or newsletter. Because paper forms will be with us for many years to come, barcoding is a great way to reduce processing costs.”

Looking Forward
Because usability, performance and accuracy improvements are always top of mind in the image recognition space, Accusoft Pegasus remains dedicated to releasing the highest-quality products. Their entire imaging portfolio of products continues to offer greater functionality and ease of use, so that their customers can build solutions even faster. Accusoft Pegasus is also currently working with customers to create mobile solutions.

“Companies who have decided to build applications can use their staff’s knowledge and understanding of their vertical and fortify it with our deep expertise in imaging,” said Setzer. “If you do that, you can create a better solution than you could build by yourself or buy from a vendor.”

For more information about Accusoft Pegasus, its imaging technology and products, visit www.accusoft.com.