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ABBYY FlexiCapture
Dynamic Data Capture System
© 2011 ABBYY. All rights reserved.
3
What is a Form?
Questionnaires, social security forms, polling slips, warranty cards are all different types of
form used to collect different types of information.
How do forms differ from other types of documents?
1. A form always has a set number of fields
2. Each field may contain only a certain type of information, e.g. a "Last
Name" field contains only last names (if completed correctly) and a "Date" field
contains only dates.
Forms are used when information must be gathered from a large number of respondents.
Manual information gathering is a long and tiresome process where typos and errors are
almost inevitable, and machine–readable forms are used to automate this process.
Automated forms processing consists of the following stages:
1. Setting up the form–processing application (creating a template and
specifying the fields to be recognized).
2. Acquiring form images (scanning).
3. Processing the form images (recognizing the images and validating
the extracted data).
4. Exporting the extracted data to an external information system.
Automated forms processing is most effective on forms that meet certain requirements
which are discussed in this chapter.