Bar Code Recognition

Barcode recognition is the most efficient way to capture index data printed on documents. Some documents already have key information in barcode format on them. If your project is to scan new documents on an ongoing basis, it may be possible for you to redesign the forms to include barcodes. Having a barcode with index data on the document is the best case scenario, since all the index data is on the document at the time it is created in a format that can be read with near 100% accuracy.

If it is not possible to print barcodes on the document itself, an alternative is to have the person who creates the document print a barcode cover page and place it on the file before it is scanned. The SimpleCoversheet application was designed to make this easy by providing a simple interface for selecting index values and printing a standard coversheet that contains these values in barcode format.

Barcode recognition can also be useful when you have documents with a variable number of pages that will all receive the same index values. If it is not possible to generate an indexed coversheet for these at the time they are created, a generic barcode coversheet can be used to separate the scanned images into multi-page files, one for each document. A second process can then be used to index these images one file at a time instead of one page at a time, greatly increasing throughput.