A

Accuracy Rate
The percent of the text which was recognized correctly. While correlated to confidence, accuracy is a measure of whether or not the SmartZone results match the actual results of the zone being analyzed.  Because the SDK can never know the actual results, the SDK cannot report accuracy.  Accuracy must be calculated by application logic comparisons of actual (ground truth) results and reported recognition results from SmartZone.

Alternate Results
When more than one possible result can be returned by the recognition algorithms, each will have an associated confidence setting. The highest confidence result is called the result, and any additional character results are called the alternate results. They generally have confidence settings lower than the initial result.

B

Blob
An isolated connected group of pixels.

C

Confidence
An indication of certainty that the result is correct. It will be stated in percent and never be greater than 100%.

E

Electronic Document
A document that has been scanned, or was originally created on a computer.

F

Field
A single rectangular region on a form defined by pixels, along with a type and various other attributes. Frequently, a field will wholly contain a single user-filled item, such as a last name or phone number.

FRD
The file extension used to indicate a Form Definition File.

FRS
The file extension used to indicate a Form Set File.

Form
As used by the Accusoft FormFix SDK, a single template image, along with various attributes and properties of the form. Forms contain zero or more fields and are part of a single form set.

Form Definition File
As used by the Accusoft FormFix SDK, a file which defines a single form and all of its fields read and written by this component. The form definition files will be wholly contained, including a template image with no references to external files. The extension of .frd will be used for all files of this type.

Form Set
A collection of one or more forms or form set files. The SmartZone component will have explicit support for form sets, in order to support identification of a form within the set.

Form Set File
A file which defines a collection of form sets and/or form definitions including all the data that defines them. The extension of .frs will be used for files of this type.

Forms Processing
An imaging application for handling printed forms. Forms processing systems often use OCR and ICR engines and data validation routines to extract hand-written or machine printed information from forms that go into a database.

G

Glyph
The visual representations of a shape in a writing system. Several glyphs may represent the same character and a glyph may represent multiple characters.

I

ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition)
Machine recognition of hand-printed characters.

N

Noise
Irrelevant or meaningless data; typically introduced during the printing/scanning process of forms handling.

O

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Reading machine printed text from paper and translating the images into a form that the computer can manipulate.

OMR (Optical Mark Recognition)
The technology of electronically extracting intended data from marked fields, such as check-boxes and fill-infields, on printed forms.

P

Portable Operating System Interface [for Unix] (POSIX)
The name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API), along with shell and utilities interfaces for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system, although the standard can apply to any operating system.

S

Segmentation
The process of taking an image and splitting it up into smaller images before attempting to recognize them as characters. Each of these smaller images is supposed to contain the pixels put there by a single character or glyph. The default segmentation settings have been optimized for recognition across a wide spectrum of image types and image qualities. Segmentation settings should be adjusted only in special cases.

T

Template
A full image of the original form, without any additional data added to it. Also called a "blank form", a template comprises all the content that is common to all images of a given form, and only the content that is common to all images of a given form.

Thread-safe
An application using this component can use multiple controls running in the same process, where they don't interfere with each other. The thread creating the control owns the control and is the only thread that can interact with it.

U

Unicode
A character set that can support a wide range of international characters. Unicode requires 16-bits to encode a character, unlike ASCII, which requires only 8 but supports only a small subset of characters beyond Latin.

UI (User Interface)
The controls or API provided for user interaction with an application or component.

 

See Also