Funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping CVISION Technologies with its quest to develop optical character recognition (OCR) software that can recognise scanned text at a rate 20-50 times faster than competing products.

The US software developer is working on software to process paper-based documents at a speed of over 20 pages per second.

Ari Gross, CTO of CVISION Technologies said: “We are very pleased with the support from the NSF. It has allowed us to recruit very talented engineers from the United States to support the development of our software.
“Our new OCR product, partially funded by the NSF, is ground breaking technology for the industry. We have been able to develop the world’s fastest OCR/recognition software while maintaining the accuracy levels end users require. We are excited to develop cutting edge technology from our NSF funding, which is also commercially viable. The software's high speed capabilities will enable any office to maximize their MFP device."

CVISION’s high speed OCR technology will be offered in PdfCompressor 5.0 and Maestro Recognition Server, both of which will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010.

PdfCompressor converts scanned documents into compressed, searchable PDF filesand is available through Practical Programs (Australia) and Datamail (New Zealand).