High-Tech Computer Experts
Kofax Ascent Capture
Product Information
High-Tech #A87K676
Production Document Capture -- Step by Step
Production document capture is a mission critical operation that requires
balanced, zero-bottleneck performance from several different hardware and
software components. Ascent Capture provides this high-performance at every
step of its process to bring you a solution that dramatically lowers your
costs of document capture.
Batch Oriented
The key to Ascent Capture is its powerful batch manager and administration.
With Ascent, system administrators use a simple menu-driven user interface
to define processing procedures and rules for each type of document, which
ensures that every document is scanned and indexed the same way. This reduces
operator training requirements, ensures consistent quality, and simplifies
system management.
Powerful Scanning
Capture is more than just scanning, but efficient scanning is the foundation
of a good system. Ascent Capture supports both single- and dual-sided scanning
via high-end video and SCSI interface models from BancTec/TDC, Bell+Howell,
Fujitsu, Kodak, Panasonic, Photomatrix, and Ricoh. Automatic document separation,
in the form of bar codes and patch codes, helps to speed the processing
of scanned documents. And, in addition to industry-leading scanning, Ascent
Capture can directly import image files into a batch. These include a variety
of popular fax and color image file formats.
Advanced Image Processing
After scanning or import, you need to get information from the image
and into your database. Ascent Capture includes the industry’s best image
processing, bar-code reading, and optical character recognition (OCR).
Ascent Capture provides the administrator with a set of point-and-click
image processing tools to guarantee the best possible OCR results. These
built-in tools include despeckle, deskew, deshade, destreak, line removal,
and character repair. Ascent Capture also includes the industry’s first
edge enhancement engine, allowing system administrators to choose from
a list of character "smoothing" tools which can reduce OCR errors by 25-50%.
Sophisticated Indexing
Ascent Capture includes multi-language software OCR, and also supports
Caere Corporation’s high-speed OCR hardware. Ascent Capture provides
both zonal OCR to create individual index values and full-text OCR to create
a searchable full-text version of the original document. Index values can
be read from bar codes. Ascent Capture can read eight different types of
bar codes, up to 25 individual bar codes per page, and the bar codes can
be rotated in any orientation.
Many documents do not lend themselves to OCR or bar-code technologies, so Ascent Capture also has a manual key entry process designed for fast "heads-down" index data entry. The Index module displays the scanned image, and presents the data entry operator with an elegant, simple data entry screen. The operator never has to touch a mouse – a proven time-waster during data entry. Validation of field length and data types are set up through menu-driven choices.
Index Validation Built-in
For customers with more complex validation requirements, Ascent Capture
includes a Visual Basic compatible macro language. This allows very
powerful access to system resources outside of Ascent Capture, including
the ability to open an external database and validate entered values against
a database or document manager. For example, if you are indexing documents
with customer account numbers, you can open the Customer Master database
on an Oracle server and validate the entered value while the scanned document
is still displayed. No need to do a separate data quality control step
– let the system do it while the
data entry operator is typing.
Integrated Quality Assurance
Scanners are not perfect. Should an index operator discover an unusable
image, Ascent Capture’s integrated Quality Assurance (QA)/Rescan process
makes repairs a snap. The index operator posts an electronic note on the
image and sends it back to a QA/Rescan specialist who can then edit the
batch, rescan and replace a page or document, or delete the entire batch
and rescan it. Ascent Capture is even smart enough to know that after rescanning,
the corrected document needs to be image processed and run through OCR
again, while ignoring documents that were not repaired. And the process
control is fully automatic – the
index operator does not worry about where the batch is going because
the automated batch manager takes care of everything.
Comprehensive Release
A document capture component system is only as good as its connection
to your business applications. Ascent Capture includes a sophisticated
Release module, the industry’s most flexible and powerful integration component,
that does three things for you:
1. Writes the image files to disk or to an image
management system.
2. Writes index data to a document manager or other
database.
3. Writes full-text OCR output files to a storage
and query product, or to a disk file.
Out of the box, Ascent Capture’s Release module can write image document
files to a network server, a local hard disk, or to Kofax’s Ascent Storage
jukebox manager component application. Index records can be written to
an ODBC-compliant database, a Microsoft JET-engine database, or to an ASCII
comma-delimited flat file. Full-text OCR files are either formatted into
a word processing format, or into a straight ASCII file and are written
to a hard disk.
| HTCE Product ID #A87K676 |