ABBYY, a leading provider of technologies and solutions to action information, has launched its Receipt Capture SDK that enables software developers to integrate automatic receipt capture and extract data from receipts to support a variety of customer loyalty and incentive programs.

Receipts serve as proofs of purchase, but collecting and verifying the data contained on those receipts can be costly, time consuming and complex.

The ABBYY Receipt Capture SDK automates the capture of important receipt data (e.g., product name, quantity, vendor name, purchase date), supporting scanned receipts as well as receipt images taken by a smartphone camera. The capabilities are optimised for companies that want to offer receipt capture and loyalty program support to their customers, or expand the speed and cost-effectiveness of their existing capture solutions.

“Retrofitting a traditional OCR SDK to accommodate receipt capture, especially for big-brand loyalty programs, is a challenge that requires significant time and investment,” said Butch Reh, VP of Licensing and Marketing at ABBYY. “This SDK was created to work out of-the-box with no technology tuning required. It gives developers a way to avoid development costs and quickly offer receipt capture to their customers.”

Because ABBYY Receipt Capture SDK eliminates the need for developers to implement their own text parsing algorithms, using the ABBYY Receipt Capture SDK is much faster and less expensive to deploy than tuning a basic OCR SDK for receipt capture or manual parsing. The SDK’s high accuracy makes verification cheaper as well.

Enhanced image pre-processing overcomes the common problems that typically plague the receipt capture process; faded, blurred and twisted images are all corrected through adaptive binarisation, automated contrast adjustment and skew correction. As a result, the tool kit excels at working with even challenging scanned images and mobile photos.

According to Reh, the benefits of the SDK go beyond the code itself. “ABBYY is a world leader in data capture technology, and thousands of developers already rely on our elite capability and support. Our newest technology saves developers’ time and money while allowing them to quickly implement advanced receipt capture technology.”

ABBYY Receipt Capture SDK is available now. The technology fully supports American receipts, other countries are currently supported in beta mode. Contact ABBYY at sales@abbyy.com.au or on 02 9004 7401 for any further information.