FormFix

FormFix is both an ActiveX and .NET component that provides developers with bitonal template-based form identification, drop-out, registration and OMR technology. Highly flexible and optimized for speed, FormFixs superior form recognition and form registration improve ICR, OCR, and OMR accuracy.
It easily interfaces with Pegasus recognition engines (see FormSuite), and with any recognition engine supporting memory-to-memory data transfers. ImagXpress and ScanFix Xpress are included with FormFix for image handling, advanced image cleanup, and TWAIN scanning.

Main features

Technical Notes
· Programming environments: Win32 visual development environments including Visual Studio 2008
· Sample code is included for: VB.NET, C#, VB, Delphi, VC++, HTML
· Object-oriented API for .NET users
· Deploys within .NET as a managed control and is fully compliant with .NET 1.0 and above
· Can also be used in any development environment that hosts ActiveX COM controls
· Can be used in a multi-threaded environment and perform synchronous thread-safe processing (more).
· Professional edition includes 8 controls: FormFix, FormDirector, ScanFix, ImagXpress, NotateXpress, ThumbnailXpress, TwainPRO and PrintPRO
· Support user-specified debug logging levels
· Optimized for speed, delivers matching results at sub-second speeds
· Supports over 10,000 unique form templates as candidates for matching
· Client/server Web development capabilities
· Increased image processing speed available via an easy to use multiple image buffering mechanism
· Two processing speeds are available (Standard and Professional editions)
· Free full-featured trial version available for immediate download

Form Setup

· API support for setting up fields, form templates, and sets of form templates
· Flexible architecture for defining custom operations at any stage of processing
· Define OMR, text, image, or custom fields on each form
· Extensive support for form processing operations

Form Identification

· Match forms against previously defined unfilled templates and return confidence values
· Provide automatic identification without the need for registration marks, ID marks, or anchor marks
· Match forms that are rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees from template image
· Match forms that have been scaled from 90% to 110% of the template size
· Match forms scanned with resolution of 50% to 150% of the template resolution
· Match forms that are skewed up to 20 degrees by pre-processing with the included ScanFix
· Identify thousands of different forms
· Limit a recognition operation to a subset of the available templates
· Set the level of effort expended in completing form matching
· Return Identification Certainty indicating confidence of form matching
· Accept a Minimum Certainty level for acceptance as a matched form
· Return up to 100 alternative form matches of lower certainty
· Quickly identify forms, even when using very large sets of template forms

Form Registration

· Automatically align a filled form to its master template based on image contents, to within one or two pixels of the blank template without requiring registration marks
· Analyze the master template form content and determine anchor points automatically
· Adjust alignment within a drop out zone to compensate for small differences between forms
· Support an alternate registration process using anchor marks in each corner
· Register forms even when the forms exhibit these characteristics:
· Skew (up to 20 degrees)
· Smaller or larger image size than the template (up to 10%)
· Forms scanned at different resolutions (up to 50% greater and lesser) than the template resolution
· Rotation (at 90, 180, and 270 degrees from the template)

Form Drop Out

· Remove template forms at sub-second speeds
· Provide confidence values to highlight problem images
· Adjust for distortion caused by printing, copying or scanning
· Precisely remove lines, broken lines, shading, noise, guide text, and more
· Automatically repair text that intersects with lines or guide text defining the form, that was damaged during template removal (fills broken characters)
· Apply "character repair" across areas of the image where the form was removed
· Apply "character smoothing" to smooth the edges of characters for increased OCR accuracy
· Support for form drop out only within specified fields or the entire image
· Create new images using pixels cropped from a source image (field clips)

OMR (Optical Mark Recognition and Mark Sense)

· Detect the presence or absence of marks or characters (for verification of signature presence for example)
· Support programmatic specification for bubble shape
· Support OMR recognition at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degree orientation
· Specify fields as grids (rows by columns) or single bubbles
· Support single and multiple mark recognition
· Recognize check-marked check boxes
· Set custom recognition parameters on a per-field basis
· Allow an unlimited number of fields
· Support programmatic specification for threshold for positive marks
· Return confidence values to check accuracy of OMR

Form Overlay

· Enables the use of dropout to access the filled, variable data
· Overlay archived "data only" file over form template for display or print
· This process dramatically reduces storage requirements
· Increase data transmission speed

Image Input, Image Output, and Image Handling

· FormFix Professional includes ImagXpress Document (read the full ImagXpress Document v8 product description) for image viewing, compression, conversion, thumbnail image support, document image processing and editing, TWAIN scanning, annotation, printing, and more
· FormFix Standard includes ImagXpress Standard (read the full ImagXpress Standard v8 product description) for basic image conversion, image processing, and TWAIN scanning

Image and Data Transfer Tool

· Included with FormFix is the FormDirector component, providing communication among multiple Pegasus Imaging components (including FormFix, SmartZone, and ScanFix Xpress)
· Assists in organizing, storing, and retrieving the descriptions and control parameters you will use while processing forms
· Supports reading, revising and writing form template set files
· Supports reading, revising and writing form template definition files
· Handles over 10,000 unique form templates
· For bitonal files (grayscale and color will be supported in a future edition)
· Supports Unicode characters
· Supports customization, including customer-defined field types and private customer data attached to form sets, forms, and fields
· Replaces the form definition and form drop out features of SmartScan Xpress ICR/OCR/OMR (form definition files), FormFix (table files), and Prizm Color IP (form definition and form suite files)

FormAssist Application with Source Code

Quickly evaluate Pegasus Imagings forms processing technology, including:
· Form identification (FormFix)
· Form dropout (FormFix)
· Zonal OCR (SmartZone)
· OMR (FormFix)
· Image display/editing (ImagXpress)
· Image cleanup (ScanFix Xpress)
Use FormAssist source code as a foundation for developing your production forms processing application:
· Illustrates best practice for integration of Pegasus components and example workflow
· Modular source code facilitates rapid development of form setup and forms processing solutions
· Included in the FormSuite .NET toolkit download as C# source code
Quickly set up forms and processing instructions
· Create, save, and manage form sets
· Add form templates to form sets
· Set up and add fields to form templates
· Configure properties for image cleanup, OCR, OMR, and processing
· Process filled images to optimize settings for OCR, OMR, and form identification