The camera for scanning documents is a core feature of fileee. It is therefore particularly important to us to be able to offer you the best functionality and optimal results here. We have therefore reworked the scan function from the ground up. In the blog article, you can find out what we paid special attention to during the revision and which new functions we have integrated.
"First of all, you notice the new interface, which of course looks better and more elegant and has been significantly optimised in terms of operation. In addition, we have integrated the new algorithm for recognising documents," reports Eike Thies, founder and product manager at fileee. As part of the interdisciplinary team from product management, iOS and Android development and design, he has been working on renewing our camera from the ground up over the last few months.
"With the new algorithm, we get a detection rate of over 90%."
"We use artificial intelligence to recognise documents even in difficult situations. For example, documents on a light background are now also recognised reliably. The algorithm is a little bit slower, but the recognition is much better. In numbers: in our test set we previously achieved 62% correctly recognised documents - with the new algorithm we get over 90%." For users, this will translate into significantly more reliable document recognition and improved scanning results. Manual post-processing of documents is hardly necessary anymore.
The camera team is also focusing on further standardising the functionalities in the iOS and Android apps. Many functions are already available in both apps. Eike: "Soon there will also be a function on iOS so that the edges "magnetically" adhere to horizontal and vertical lines when editing documents manually. If you do need to edit manually, this will make it much easier". On Android, on the other hand, the re-sorting of pages has been significantly improved. The aim is to offer as many functions as possible on both platforms in the coming months. New in both versions is the screen after saving a document. While the document is still being analysed, it can be directly shared, viewed or a reminder can be set. A new scan can also be started without detours.
Despite uniform interfaces, Eike says the development of camera functions on mobile devices is a major challenge that leads to longer development times. "Especially with Android, there are simply umpteen different manufacturers with differences, as well as peculiarities and problems per device. Although Google provides an interface, in practice it is unfortunately the case that for each manufacturer, or even for each device, obstacles have to be circumnavigated and special cases considered. This makes development very time-consuming: tests take a long time, are error-prone and frustrating. And for users, of course, it is sometimes incomprehensible why the camera does not work 100% correctly in your case".
In order to be able to quickly fix smaller problems in the coming weeks, direct feedback from you is particularly helpful and ensures even better results in the long term. In the future, it is planned to improve the camera and the underlying AI even further with the help of the users. So far, the AI has only been trained with thousands of internal data. In the future, however, it will be possible to involve the users even more. However, data protection must be the first priority. We have even made internal documents that come from our employees unrecognisable for the training and also encrypted them.
We also continue to place great emphasis on user-friendliness with the camera. Especially in document enhancement, other apps often offer many setting options where the user does not know exactly what is happening or when to use them. "We only have three setting options that work equally well in all situations, but have different strengths. But here too, like others, we have room for improvement in the future. So we hope that in the future, hopefully with AI and new methods, we will be able to improve the documents in such a way that the two most important goals are always achieved: Firstly, the document must look good visually and secondly, especially in our case, the OCR must work very well. Here, many users don't know that in addition to the visual enhancement, it is also about the improvement for the OCR, which is also a core feature of fileee through the full-text search and automatic analysis of metadata," says Eike.Therefore, we continue to place great emphasis on the improvements for the OCR with the document enhancement and do not only focus on the purely visual result. Compared to other competitors, however, fileee often offers a better and clearer scan result here as well.
The new camera for scanning documents is now available in the fileee apps for iOS and Android. In the coming months, both versions will be updated with minor improvements and adjustments. We look forward to your feedback.
