Established as the core technology behind all Nuance imaging products it is widely recognized as the #1 imaging and OCR toolkit on the market today. The OmniPage Capture Software Development Kit (SDK) provides everything you need to add robust imaging, OCR recognition, and PDF capabilities to your applications.
In addition to outstanding speed and accuracy with numerous product performance options and best-in-class PDF handling, the OmniPage Capture SDK 18 delivers support for the .NET environment, workflow controls, and logical form recognition technologies that streamline your development and provide added value to your products.
Used by commercial vendors who are serious about high OCR accuracy and quality document imaging in their applications, the OmniPage Capture SDK provides scalable voting recognition engines, extraordinary PDF support, and a simple API that lets your create high-value, competitive products while maximizing productivity and ensuring the greatest return on your investment.
*API sub-set compatible with Windows version
The latest update of OmniPage Capture SDK is 18.5, which includes native 64-bit support for Windows. Runtime order and support for version 12 have been discontinued. Runtime order and support for version 15 will be discontinued on March 31, 2013.
What's New in Version 18?
The OmniPage Capture Software Development Kit (SDK) has always been the gold standard for developers wanting to add sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR), imaging, and PDF creation and conversion capabilities to their own applications quickly and easily.
And with the release of the OmniPage Capture SDK 18, the best just got even better.
Significant accuracy and speed improvements, robust new development features, and continued innovation make OmniPage Capture SDK the most comprehensive suite of developer tools for embedding document imaging software.
Refreshed and updated with significant improvements – all without changing the API from version 16 – the OmniPage Capture SDK makes it easy to upgrade our application's capabilities. Add in the substantial enhancements, and it's easy to see why OmniPage Capture SDK for Windows remains the preferred choice of savvy developers of commercial imaging vendors.
Speed and Accuracy
Your customers want speed and accuracy – not one or the other. As a developer you know that OCR is dependent on a variety of factors that can be radically different from one application to another. OmniPage was developed and improved in ways that offer the best methods for balancing speed and accuracy based on your intended purpose. Work on our own applications have allowed us to see such improvements as:
Create accurate Searchable PDF from PDF files of unknown origin
For application developers that deal with PDF files the road is long and treacherous. PDF files can be created a variety of ways and may not contain text data necessary for indexing or searching. An OCR process generally treats all PDF files as images exposing your application to unnecessary OCR conversions that can create more problems than they solve. You can spend a lot of time and resources trying to programmatically work around these issues or you can simply use the new PDF Handling API. The OmniPage CSDK can automatically recognize only the image parts of any PDF and apply an OCR process where necessary making the process fast and extremely accurate without modifying, damaging or loosing existing text elements.
In addition this new PDF handling component allows page-level operations on PDF files. Pages can be deleted or copied and moved within or between PDF files. Pages from image files (TIFF or JPEG) can be inserted into PDF files. If recognition is performed on these pages before insertion, they can be searched within the PDF. The handling module registers all requested changes, and then when the commands are fully assembled, they are performed in one seamless operation.
These PDF operations are applicable to a wide range of imaging applications requiring text extraction and indexing for document management and cloud storage services types of applications and for PDF document assembly applications in any scanning workflow that includes text based PDF. The application possibilities are limitless and offer great ways to differentiate your products while providing maximum customer satisfaction with optimal performance and reliability.
Automatic language detection for maximum productivity
The quality and accuracy of OCR is language dependent for a number of reasons. It's simply inefficient to stop your application to change the language selection in order to get the best accuracy. A new auto-language detection setting solves this problem and allows for unattended scanning or document input scenarios where the language may change from document to document or page to page
New image processing functions save time and increase accuracy
Marks, borders and halftones can create “ghost” or unintended characters and ultimately lower OCR accuracy. The OmniPage Capture SDK features new image processing functions that can clean scanned images and improve document quality. An auto-crop facility allows all incoming images to be analyzed and larger border areas to be removed, leaving only margins with predefined dimensions. Punch hole marks or scanning shadows can be cleaned from marginal areas. A wider choice of despeckling methods is available. Black-and-white images can be better prepared for OCR processing by erosion and dilatation; this involves changing the value of a given pixel depending on the value of neighboring pixels. Erosion has the effect of thinning character shapes, while dilatation fortifies them. A new whiteboard function improves the legibility of whiteboard texts captured by digital cameras.
Create visually appealing and more useful application with pre-built components
The OmniPage SDK is unique because it features pre-built components that we use in our own applications. We've improved how these components are implemented and how they look too. We even included a sample application that demonstrates how we use these components for an improved user experience.
Improved free form recognition on gridded forms
Free form recognition is performed for processing batches of forms with different layouts where a template cannot be used. The OmniPage Capture SDK can extract the text from a form so your application may present useful information to the user such as account numbers, invoice values and totals, or any information in a form that you want to end up in a database. The zoning algorithms for forms with a tabular (gridded) structure have been refined to improve the OCR accuracy.
Key Features for the OmniPage Capture SDK for Windows
The OmniPage Capture SDK offers a robust feature set to support all your imaging needs. You get the power and accuracy of OmniPage - the most popular OCR program in the world - integrated into your applications, along with top-of-the line OCR engines and extensive PDF capabilities. The strength of OmniPage Capture SDK extends beyond unrivaled accuracy, with additional features to streamline application development and provide added value to your product.
The most accurate and robust OCR available
OmniPage provides a scalable voting interface and significant throughput management capabilities. Combined with highly accurate machine-print OCR (OCR, OCR-A, OCR-B and MICR), handprint (ICR), checkmark (OMR) and barcode (1D and 2D) recognition engines, the OmniPage Capture SDK delivers unmatched flexibility and accuracy.
Asian OCR support
The OmniPage Capture SDK Asian OCR module supports Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It can be used either as a standalone module or with the Western language kit.
Support for the .NET managed environment
OmniPage Capture SDK 16 supports.NET, one of the leading development environments. C# and VB.NET sample recognition programs and sample viewers are included.
Multi-core and multi-thread processor support
Better multithreading and parallel processing on multi-page documents in the OmniPage Capture SDK let you exploit the full potential of your processing environment. In multi-page mode, OmniPage Capture SDK 16 runs up to 43% faster than previous versions on a quad-core machine.
Pre-made user interfaces
The OmniPage Capture SDK’s Professional Visual Toolbox gives you pre-made interfaces for creating and executing workflows, controlling scanning devices, and document processing. It includes visual controls for advanced OCR and image enhancement tools. Use this module to create OmniPage-compatible workflows and monitor their execution.
Workflow development and execution
You can easily create complex image processing and OCR tasks and manage all parameters and settings. Then, adding OCR to your application can be just one workflow execution call. Workflow features also help balance the load on dual core and hyperthreaded systems to boost performance.
Logical Form Recognition technology
Our advanced logical form recognition (LFR) automates form template creation and streamlines form processing, providing significant savings in development time.
Throughput management
Updated throughput capabilities provide significant advantages over other SDKs, allowing you to deploy optimal document imaging throughput for your application.
Integrated PDF toolkit
Extensive PDF capabilities - including unique PDF overlay matching that achieves near-100% accuracy in PDF conversion- allow you to significantly reduce development costs and time-to-market. The OmniPage Capture SDK also supports output to the PDF/archive (PDF/A) format and generates multi-raster-content PDFs optimized for file size and quality.
Format support
The OmniPage Capture SDK supports a wide range of image and application format, including BMP, GIF, TIF, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats, XML, Open eBook and more. These provide significant advantages over other SDKs, allowing you to achieve optimal image throughput for your applications. There is also support for a wide range of input/output filters, including PDF, Microsoft® Office 2007, XML, and Open eBook standards.
Text-to-speech (TTS)
The OmniPage Capture SDK is also the only OCR SDK that includes text-to-speech technologies. You applications can turn paper and digital documents into human-sounding audio files. Not only is this an important way to provide document support for disabled users, it allows everyone to save documents to files that can be played on personal computers and mobile devices, including Apple iPod.
These advanced features, along with breakthrough PDF capabilities that achieve 100% word accuracy in converting text-based PDF documents, enable you to significantly reduce the cost of development and time-to-market. That’s why the OmniPage Capture SDK is the most powerful and complete document-imaging SDK in the world.
The OmniPage Capture SDK can be accessed through a C/C++ API or ActiveX interface. Support for Windows XP and Vista application development enables you to easily create applications with a wide variety of recognition technologies using a single set of developer tools.
Developer System Requirements
Runtime System Requirements
Product Architecture
Interfaces
Two programming interfaces are available with the OmniPage Capture SDK:
C/C++ API The C/C++ API provides control over image input, image preprocessing, recognition, and output and supports image processing on a page basis.
Professional Visual Toolbox
In conjunction with the ActiveX interface, a set of controls, collectively called the Professional Visual Toolbox, is available as an add-on module. Pre-made controls allow you to reduce development time and speed time-to-market by allowing plug-in interfaces for your application.
ActiveX
An ActiveX interface is provided for Visual C++ programmers. This interface includes all functionality of the C interface and offers document-processing capabilities so you can create solutions that manage documents more efficiently. This interface also expands the support of modern development environments, including managed environments like VB.NET or C#.
Pre-made Controls
Image Input
The image input subsystem provides TWAIN scanner and image-conversion interfaces. Both color and grayscale images can be handled by the OmniPage Capture SDK and you can send images from memory to the preprocessing and recognition processes. Input conversion for TIFF, TIFF/JPEG, TIFF-FX, PCX, DCX, BMP, ADF, JPEG, PNG, PaperPort MAX and PDF image formats are available.
Image Pre-Processing
Image correction and pre-processing greatly enhances image quality and recognition accuracy.
These capabilities include:
An interface for integrating additional image pre-processing technologies is also available and extends the system's functionality by permitting customization of the system's image processing capabilities.
Recognition Module Management
The OmniPage Capture SDK's component manager supports the integration of 12 individual recognition modules into your application. Modules for machine print OCR, ICR (handprint OCR), barcode, OMR (checkbox), OCR-A, OCR-B and E-13B (MICR) are provided. An interface is also provided to incorporate additional recognition technologies into your application. This interface lets you pass images, receive recognition output, and pass configuration commands to the desired recognition module.
Asian OCR software is supported in the OmniPage Capture SDK, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean with full layout retention. See Asian OCR Support for more information.
Output Processing
The OmniPage Capture SDK's output processing subsystem takes output from the recognition modules and converts it into a desired format, such as BMP, GIF, TIFF, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats, XML, Open eBook, and more. PDF output is supported in four formats including:
Product Configurations
The OmniPage Capture SDK is available in three configurations with two optional add-ons:
The Professional Recognition Kit
The Professional OCR Kit
Asian OCR Kit - This kit provides support for Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean OCR software with full layout retention and searchable PDF output.
Add-On Options
PDF Output Module - This optional add-on includes PDF export filters for output in PDF Normal, Normal With Image Substitutes, Image Only and Image On Text formats.
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