Adobe has announced its latest addition to Adobe Scan, a service can that can convert the written paper documents into searchable PDFs. Other than big-sized documents, Adobe Scan can now scan business cards and turn them into mobile contacts on iOS and Android.
Now when someone gives you a business card, you can simply instantly extract the contact details given on the card and store in the mobile. And all this happens even without typing it line by line. Moreover, if you are an Adobe Document Cloud subscriber, all the data will save in its cloud too.
Then you can politely hand the card back. No need to accumulate and fill your wallet/bag/office drawers with the stack of business cards during a conference or a visiting a trade show. What a relief!
Though this feature is already available in Google Lens and Microsoft’s Office, Adobe is leveraging its text recognition superpower that makes it far sharper scanner app.
Adobe Scan Intelligent Technology
The design company, Adobe is definitely progressing towards replacing the paper culture with the digital processes. Adobe Scan has been downloaded 10 million times since its launch in March 2017.
By incorporating the super-smart artificial intelligence Adobe Sensei technology in Adobe Scan, the app can identify the card borders and rotate skewed perspectives, balance dim& dark lighting and apply optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the text.
During low lighting, Adobe’s intelligent technology commands Adobe Scan camera to switch on the flash exactly at the moment of click. It can even easily spot dark shadows formed by phone or the holder’s finger or thumb at the card’s edge. The app crops out all dark lights while scanning the contact details, writes Lisa Croft, the author at Adobe blog.
Following this, the app user has to just click on “Save Contact” option to automatically add the person’s contact details such as name, phone number and email address. Additionally, Adobe Scan will also save an image of the business card to the contacts. So that’s a backup plan if the Adobe scanner app misses out any information! The app’s performance is “unparalleled”, boasts Akhil Chugh, Product Manager at Adobe.
“Adobe Scan taps the heterogeneous compute capabilities of both Android and iOS devices to remove unwanted objects from the scan, like fingers, and uses heuristics models to identify fields like email addresses with 99 percent accuracy. In the rare instances it doesn’t get a name or number right, it offers machine learning-powered suggestions,” explained VentureBeat.
Adobe Scan can now scan business cards and turn them into mobile contacts on iOS and Android. Source: Adobe
Types of Business Cards
There are three types of business cards from the computing perspective. First one is the most common – white background and black text. Adobe Scan could easily get trained on this category.
The next type of business card is white or gray text printed on a black background and the final one is colored text with a colored background. To operate the scanner on these kinds of business cards, Adobe applied AI to invert the colors of the components, that is, white background with black text.
The equivalent challenge was thrust from white cards lying on the white background. “It took a couple of months to solve,” Chugh said.
Presently Adobe Scan can scan business cards in English only. The design company will bring support for other languages very soon.
Adobe also introduced other enhanced features in other Adobe Document Cloud products including Adobe Sign and PDF integration with Microsoft Office 365.
