For Current customers, FineReader Engine 8.0 is backward compatible with previous versions including FineReader Engine 5.0, 6.0, 6.02, 7.0, 7.1.

ABBYY FineReader Engine 8.0 inherits all the new features that are available in FineReader Engine 7.1. In addition, it offers a set of special unique features, including:

Recognition and Document Analysis

• Field Level/Zonal Recognition Support
  FineReader Engine 8.0 raises the bar on its offering by now delivering complete field level recognition capabilities to support key business processes such as: forms processing, key-word classification, and keyword indexing.
  ABBYY's latest technologies are designed to deliver high accuracy for small fields/zones within documents. Powerful image preprocessing functions increase FineReader Engine's ability to small zone areas of any quality, with any type of image nuance which may affect the recognition accuracy (i.e.-underlined text, after-scanning garbage, spaces in the text, etc.) Key functionality for field level or zonal recognition includes multilingual OCR and ICR, OMR, and barcode recognition, and the following areas of field level recognition-specific functionality or enhancement, including:

  • Data extraction from fields with various borders and frames, including combo-box, underlined fields, boxes, and even fields where the data does not fit within the field border.
  • Definition of field content by setting alphabets, dictionaries, regular expressions, types of segmentations, handwriting styles, etc.
  • Detection of in-field spacing, accurately recognizing fields where the spaces are allowed. FineReader Engine 8.0 also allows use of dictionaries which contain word-combinations with spaces.
  • Intelligent processing of blocks with intersecting parts and lines, recognizing the text words and symbols completely located within block borders, avoiding the time spent on non-relevant text block information.
  • Text block despeckle, with the ability to specify the size of white or black "garbage".
  • Fast mode ICR, performing ICR up to two times faster.

  Field Level recognition is further supported by new development level support in the form of a Voting API and "on-the-fly" recognition tuning (Please see following sections for details).

• OCR Accuracy Enhancements
  Intelligent image analysis in FineReader Engine 8.0 delivers higher recognition accuracy. FineReader technology automatically adjusts its algorithms to account for image condition, resulting in increased accuracy by up to 30% on low resolution documents (scanned at under 200 dpi or faxes).
• Digital Camera OCR
  Differentiates between document images captured from digital cameras or scanners and delivers special image preprocessing algorithms to address problems typically associated with digital camera images such as poor lighting, out-of-focus text, distorted text lines and missing resolution information,. New pre-processing functions for straightening text lines further help to correct camera lens distortions. The result is improvement of up to 40% in digital camera OCR (compared to previous versions of the technology). Ideal for creation of applications that may use digital cameras to capture difficult-to-scan documents such as thick bonded books.
• Document Analysis for Full Text Indexing
  Automatically detects and recognizes all text on documents including text embedded in pictures, charts, and diagrams. Developers may choose to use this mode of document analysis to extract exhaustive full-text information on documents needed for document index building (as in DMS, CMS, Archiving systems).

PDF Conversion

Enhancements to ABBYY's intelligent PDF conversion technologies increase performance and applicability:

• Faster and More Accurate PDF Processing (up to two times faster)
  Analyses internal information within the source PDF files such as annotations, metadata, text objects, font dictionaries and content streams and as a result enhances PDF performance and speed by efficient and accurate selection. When the text is embedded, examines the integrity of the text layer, and makes a decision as to whether or not to extract the text or apply OCR on a block by block basis.
• Capture of Internal PDF Information, extracting internal PDF links, hyperlinks and document properties such as: subject, author, title, and keywords.

• PDF Security and Encryption Support:
  The 8.0 platform now supports a variety of PDF security settings, increasing its applicability for government agencies and other organisations demanding high security.
• "Open File" password settings designed to prevent unauthorized access to a
  document.
• Restriction of certain operations, such as printing, editing or extracting file
  content, by assigning permission passwords.
• Support for the latest encryption standards.
• Output in Tagged PDF Format - that can be "reflowed" to fit different page or screen widths. Ideal for use with handheld devices (PDAs) or screen readers typically used by visually impaired users.
• Page Size - Ability to set the size for all pages of a output PDF file.
• Links in PDF Files -Recreates hyperlinks within a PDF file.

Data Capture from Semi-structured Forms and Documents (support for ABBYY FlexiCapture 1.5)

Support for the newest enhancements to the ABBYY FlexiCapture technology make form and semi-structured document processing even more accurate and minimizes the amount of adjustments required for each project. New features include:

Support for New Layout Formats

• Table Blocks: enables proper reading of tables in documents, providing easy extraction of line- item details. Ideal for invoices and financial documents.
• Specialised numerical elements support for new "Phone" and "Currency" element types.

• Texture Filtering
  Enhanced pre-processing technologies screen out irrelevant texture that may affect recognition quality, including in headers of table elements.
• Multiple Language Selection
  Enables pre-selection of mixed-language combinations, (i.e. English-German) for easier processing of multiple language documents.

Development Platform Function Enhancement

New tools that enhance a developer's ability to interact with FineReader Engine and manipulate the recognition process on the core level:

• Voting API Support
  Gives developers addition information for using FineReader Engine as one of the participating recognition engines in an external (or 3rd party) Voting algorithm. Supplies recognition alternatives (or hypotheses) with relevant confidence level on characters, words and inter character separation. Helps developers design an efficient and accurate voting algorithm for applications that require multiple recognition technology sources.
• "On the fly" Core Recognition Tuning
  Ability to manipulate the Engine during the recognition process. Developers can influence the hypothesis choice procedure by inserting additional ranking criteria which is used by the technology during the recognition to deliver the best result. Useful in tasks using specific criterion for recognition (own hypothesis for recognition accuracy).
• Code Samples for Common Conversion Tasks
  An additional resource for quick and easy tuning of the FineReader technology. A set of code samples with ready-to- load profiles provides optimal balance of speed and accuracy for particular tasks such as conversion to Searchable PDF, field-level recognition, archiving with imaging and indexing, full-page conversion to RTF and HTML. Database also contains sample images and benchmarks.

New Input Formats

• GIF format. With high compression capabilities, GIF is ideal for Internet-related applications such as SPAM filtering, web publishing, etc.
• DjVu format - enabling additional support for imaging, archiving and content management solutions.