Scientific Advances Drive Innovative Technologies for ECM Recognition and Classification

“New scientific advances in artificial intelligenceservices during installation, and their low
are allowing Optical Character Recognition (OCR)recognition accuracy forces customers to
and Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR)manually sort a significant number of their
products to significantly reduce the time anddocuments. Typical OCR solutions are unable to
costs associated with identifying, sorting andautomatically identify the language on a page and
extracting information from large and disparatecannot extract information from low resolution or
volumes of paper documents – and havedegraded documents.
made the quest for a digital mailroom into a 
reality,”  says David Rock, president ofThe good news is that new advanced
NovoDynamics, Inc.   technologies, which leverage rich legacies in
 scientific approaches to artificial intelligence, are
NovoDynamics, an Ann Arbor, MI technology firmnow available to overcome the challenges faced
has applied advanced science, including artificialby the multi-national financial services firms, large
intelligence, pixel on page analytics and an array ofinsurance companies, manufacturing, government
other innovative technologies to help organizationsorganizations, the security sector, and others who
burdened with paper documents to make theirdeal with voluminous amounts of paper
business processes more effective.  While a trulydocuments that contain the critical information to
paperless environment is likely not achievable, byrun their operations efficiently.  Whether the
applying next-generation OCR and IDR technology,mission is to stay competitive in a business
processes can become much more costenvironment or better serve a constituency with
effective. public sector services, the ability to make the
 processing of information more automatic saves
As Enterprise Content Management (ECM) andtime and money.
Business Process Management (BPM) vendors 
attempted to rise to the “paperless”New artificial intelligence and image analysis
challenge with new OCR/IDR solutions, serioustechnology embedded in OCR/IDR solutions is
obstacles remained. The available technology wasavailable today that eliminates a huge cost hurdle
unsuccessful in addressing customers’ needsby providing automatic document recognition
because it was unable to reliably recognizetraining – no professional services or tedious,
documents whose content was shifted or scaled,error-prone manual sorting needed.  The
it couldn’t detect the languages on a page tocomputer does the work, not the customer. 
automatically perform OCR, and it couldn’tTackling problems with degraded pages or ones
extract information from degraded or lowthat are rotated is also no problem.  Recognizing
resolution scanned images. The adoption rate ofpages whose content is shifted or scaled is also
IDR solutions was slow because customers werehandled automatically as is the ability to find
not achieving the cost reductions and improvedinformation stored on a page and automatically
efficiencies that they expected.detect its language for conversion into computer
 text.  Best of all, this new technology can easily
“Globalization has added additional pressure forand quickly, through an API, be integrated into
effective OCR and IDR solutions becausethird party solutions.
companies are being forced to do more with less. 
Effective ECM solutions must identify, sort andThis “next generation” technology radically
extract information in multiple languages tochanges the way businesses can manage
provide greater efficiencies and costmission-critical information.  It sets the bar at a
reductions,” says Rock. much higher level and no doubt will continue to be
 refined as new scientific discoveries are made.
1. Typical IDR solutions are difficult to train,But, for now, the digital mailroom is within reach.
requiring customers to pay for costly professional