ASTRI’s Intelligent Document Processing Platform utilizes a customized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine and various computer vision techniques to create a robust and versatile workflow for processing handwritten forms and documents into digital mediums. The platform is widely used in various financial and government institutions to help with data-entry from handwritten forms.

The solution addresses the following issues in the industry:

Conventional OCR solutions target printed characters and are limited to only certain fonts and Latin languages.
Recognition performance on handwritten characters in unlimited number of writing styles is subpar compared to printed characters.
Inability to recognize Chinese language well with full coverage of its characters and their variants limits market potential.
Usage of handwritten forms is still prominent in the financial and public sector.
Recognition is usually done on the cloud, which requires persistent online connection, potentially jeopardizing the security of sensitive data.

Core Technologies

Intelligent Character Recognition

The Intelligent Character Recognition Engine is a deep learning-based OCR engine and is one of the most essential components of our platform.

The engine is capable of classifying at least 8000 alphanumeric, Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters, which covers 漢語大字典, 小學常用字表, 小學教學參考詞語表 (試用) and most special Chinese characters that exist only in Hong Kong addresses, with high accuracy:

Simplified Chinese accuracy: 97.0%*
Traditional Chinese accuracy: 98.0%
Numeric digits accuracy: 99.7%
English alphabets accuracy: 99.0%

Handwritten Chinese Recognition

The Single-line Handwritten Chinese Recognition Engine leverages our Intelligent Character Recognition Engine and our character segmentation algorithm to perform OCR on a Chinese sentence, inheriting all features presented in our Intelligent Character Recognition Engine.

Handwritten English Recognition

Our Handwritten English Recognition Engine is a context-aware OCR engine that takes sentence context into account to further increase recognition accuracy. It supports both printed and handwritten alphanumeric text.

Digit-string Recognition

Our Digit-string OCR Engine offers robust recognition of pure numeric characters that exist in cheques and financial documents, such as dates, prices and mathematical expressions.

Hong Kong Address Database

We maintain an up-to-date database of all Hong Kong addresses to validate the recognition results of our Document Processing Platform on demand. A custom database parsing algorithm is also developed to allow the process to be done quickly during runtime.

* Accuracy on Simplified Chinese is based on the International test set from ICDAR 2013; Accuracy on digits is based on the test set from International dataset MNIST; Accuracy on Traditional Chinese is based on in-house test set.

Applications

Form Recognition

Form recognition is one of the main use case of our Intelligent Document Processing Platform. The deployed application fully utilizes all of the platform’s features including multi-language handwritten text recognition and address correction.

HKID Recognition

Our HKID Recognition system enables low-cost, contactless and fast recognition of both generations of HKID. The system can be set up with a low-end computing device and a simple webcam. All processing is done on-device with a number of validation steps to provide additional robustness.

Document Comparison Platform

The Document Comparison Platform addresses the labor-intensive process of comparing business critical documents. The platform detects changes between different versions of the document, and visualize the differences in a printer-friendly format. It is also deployed as a web service for cross platform compatibility.

Our Team

Our team focuses on applied machine learning and computer vision, with years of experience developing OCR technologies and document processing applications for the FinTech industry and public sector. We strive to produce AI solutions that are robust and ready to be integrated with minimal disruption to existing workflow. Applications on document verification, natural language processing (NLP) and medical care are under active development.

Recognitions

Our product is one of the winners of the Golden Medal award at the 46th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, April 2018.

Public media reported December 2018. Our OCR technology has drawn attention from different industries, praising its speed, accuracy and practicality.

For any inquiries or feedback on using our products in your organisation, please reach out to us here. Thank you!