CeBIT - Hannover and Brussels, 18th March 2004 - I.R.I.S. Group, a publicly traded company (Euronext: IRI), market leader in Automatic Document Recognition (ADR), Electronic Document Management (EDM) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) announced today that it has just released Formiris Pro 5.1, the new version of its Form Reading Solution.
Formiris Pro is an intelligent software suite that automatically captures, sorts and identifies all types of documents and forms entering a company or organization, irrespective of their size, layout and contents.
It further extracts the documents' relevant data using I.R.I.S.'s in-house recognition technologies: OCR for machine printed information, ICR for hand-printed data, OMR for marks in check boxes, BCR for barcodes.
I.R.I.S.'s ICR Voting(r) technology is used to provide the best possible ICR results. The recognized data is carefully verified, validated and controlled - automatically and interactively - via a series of operating modules before it can be exported in any standard format. The original paper-based data is quickly and safely converted into digital information that can be directly used in any other content management applications.
From several years, Formiris Pro is meeting a large commercial success and has been chosen by prestigious organizations like:
The "FPS Finance" (Belgian Ministry of Finance): installation of the ScanFin center for the digitization of 4.000.000 VAT forms a year.
The Czech Statistics Office: processing of 28 million census forms in less than 5 months.
The Belgian INS-NIS ("National Institute for Statistics"): reading of 15 million forms during the Belgian population census.
France Telecom: reading of cost reduction request forms.
The European Commission: automation of the job application form processing.
For Pierre De Muelenaere, CEO and President of I.R.I.S. this new version represents a major improvement, as "Formiris Pro becomes the ONLY Form Reading solution that sort and process OCR and ICR on forms written in Greek and languages based on Cyrillic alphabets". He adds: "Although the paper forms will last for a long time, some projects of Form Reading are developed based on electronic forms. This is why it is now possible to import these electronic forms into Formiris Pro to take advantage of all the power of the recognition technology of our software."
The new version of Fomiris Pro contains mainly two major new features:
Handling of the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.
Compared to previous version, these alphabets may be used in all processes and tools, including the OCR anchor text, and the identification by keywords. The support of languages has been updated for the ICR on Greek characters also.
Formiris Pro is now able to proceed:
Intelligent Sorting and Indexing on documents in 100 languages: Western and Eastern Europe, Greek, Turkish, Russian, etc.
OCR on documents in 100 languages: Western and Eastern Europe, Greek, Turkish, Russian, etc.
ICR on documents from 17 countries: Western and Eastern Europe, Greek, Turkish.
Import of e-Forms.
Batches of e-Forms can be automatically imported by Formiris Pro and mixed with standard batches and integrated in the Formiris Pro workflow. They will go through the same correction and validation modules of traditional batches.
e-Forms can be HTML or any other format, designed by the project teams or VARs.
Key Features of Formiris Pro.
Full color document processing and dual-stream architecture.
For the first time in the history of form reading, color images can be used throughout the whole document reading processing. This brings comfort, quality, efficiency. Formiris Pro is the only form reader that is fully integrated with the dual-stream high-speed acquisition software KODAK Capture Software. The images are scanned in color, greyscale or black&white. The images can further be validated and exported in color.
In-house award-winning technologies.
With Formiris Pro, you benefit from a wide palette of I.R.I.S.'s in-house award-winning recognition technologies: OCR for typewritten characters, ICR for hand-printed data, OMR for marks in check boxes, BCR for barcodes.
I.R.I.S.'s recognition engines offer an unmatched combination of speed and accuracy and have been selected by imaging market leaders such as KODAK, HP, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Sharp, Canon. Formiris Pro is based on the best of I.R.I.S.'s recognition technologies. Thanks to the I.R.I.S. ICR Voting(r) technology, it provides unprecedented ICR accuracy.
Automatic processing of Flexible Forms.
Documents with variations in layout, data font, languages and graphical elements, the so-called "flexible forms", can now be automatically processed as a whole in the system. Thanks to I.R.I.S.'s newly developed technology, I.R.I.S. FlexForm(r), all flexible forms are processed according to one and same description file, using the unique OCR technology of I.R.I.S. and artificial intelligence algorithms. With I.R.I.S.
FlexForm(r), 80% of flexible documents can be automatically processed, without any human intervention.
Unique supervision tools.
Unique with Formiris Pro: the supervision tools that help you avoid any operational problem during the whole processing. The Audit Trail module offers a wide range of indicators and statistical/graphical reports that make you have full control over the user's achievements and the system's productivity. No room is left either for lack of quality: no data can be left out. A unique Query Management tool offers direct communication with the form fillers who can send any missing data.
Flexible client-server architecture.
Formiris Pro is a flexible client-server application that runs on different operating systems - Microsoft Windows, Unix and Linux - and operates with different databases, including SQLBase, Oracle and Informix.
About I.R.I.S.
Image Recognition Integrated Systems (I.R.I.S.), a Belgian company founded in 1987 and listed on Euronext Brussels (IRI), is a leader in the "Document to Knowledge" market, and provides extremely high-quality solutions for converting paper documents into electronic formats for archiving, storing, managing and sharing digital information.
In 2002, the revenue of I.R.I.S. Group was Euro 41.646.974. I.R.I.S. has more than 220 employees based in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels (Belgium), Massy and Rueil-Malmaison (France), Luxembourg and Delray Beach (USA).
I.R.I.S. has been awarded "Enterprise of the Year 2002" by the Belgian committee of the worldwide "Entrepreneur of the Year" competition.
For more information on our company, our solutions or our products, visit the I.R.I.S. web site at http://www.irislink.com.
To get more information:
I.R.I.S. Europe Headquarters
Press contact: Virginie Stainier
Tel: +32 (0) 10 48 75 13
Fax: +32 (0) 10 45 34 43
E-mail: virginie.stainier@irislink.com
Journalists can register on the I.R.I.S. Extranet web site by clicking on the link http://www.irislink.com/group/press. They will receive a personal login and password to access the Extranet web site where more corporate and product information is available.
Press contact in the Netherlands:
Raek! Communicatie
Eindhoven
Tel. 040 25 18 938
E-mail raek@wxs.nl