Samtech forays into ICR solutions domain

Delhi-based Samtech Infonet has recently forayed in the domain of Intelligent

Character Recognition (ICR) with its tie-up with Israel-based Top Image Systems.

With the technology gaining near-perfection in recognizing handwritten

characters, company officials feel the market for ICR applications is poised for

growth.

The technology is presently being used for applications that involve a large

volume of data capture that has initially been captured on paper, for instance

the census of India or the surveys as conducted by market research companies.

Samtech has currently deployed applications running on the technology at the

Ministry of Small Scale Industries, Associates, the retail-financing arm of

Citibank among others.

The technology uses three engines for recognition and character is deemed

recognized only if two of the three engines recognize it. Says Alok Gupta, MD,

Samtech, "Exceptions are thrown out and the rate is as low as three to four

percent."

In effect this means that the software is unable to recognize three to four

of 100 characters and human intervention to correct gets limited to this value.

The software has been customized to provide a unified capture option. Herein

irrespective of the mode of capture the data can be integrated into a single

database. "Data capture today happens at the store front, on the web or

through surveys and all these can be integrated seamlessly," said Alok.

Also the software can be integrated to run with any backend system.

While the company is not looking for partners in the immediate future, plans

to go the channel way are not ruled out. "We are still on the learning

curve and are still educating ourselves," said Alok.

MOHIT CHHABRA