Adobe Scan uses advanced AI to convert physical business cards into digital cards

Adobe announced new enhancements to Adobe Document Cloud with advancements in its products including “Adobe Sign”, “Adobe Scan” and new portable document format (PDF) integration with Microsoft Office 365.
With the new Adobe PDF Services integration in Microsoft Office 365, users would now be able to create, manipulate and view high-quality, secure PDFs right from the ribbon in online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and SharePoint.
“Adobe and Microsoft are integrating best-in-class cloud services to meet the needs of today’s agile and rapidly evolving workforce,” Ashley Still, Vice President and General Manager, Digital Media, Adobe, said in a statement.
Adobe became Microsoft’s preferred e-signature solution for Office 365 in September 2017, and now the company would deliver deeper integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
“Building on the initial success of our partnership focused on Adobe Sign, we’re thrilled that Microsoft Office 365 customers now have access to the expansive PDF services from Adobe,” said Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office 365 at Microsoft Corp.
The company also claimed that “Adobe Sign” would be part of the “Federal Risk and Authorisation Management Program (FedRAMP)”, that complies with the strictest government security standards.
The complex AI?algorithm behind new Adobe Scan
Additionally, “Adobe Scan” which is a free app to turn phones and tablets into a scanning and text recognition tool, introduced new functionality that turns physical business cards into digital contacts on phones, powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning platform. While there are a number of such third-party applications, Google’s Lens and Microsoft’s Office Lens also provide similar features.
Adobe further explains how its technology makes sure the AI?detects the physical card as card and not any other kind of document.
“By using Adobe’s advanced image processing techniques, powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe Scan can make the digital text on a business card extractable, reusable, and searchable in a secure, reliable PDF. It even automatically removes unwanted objects from your business card scan, like that thumb or finger you’re using to hold the card. This is actually a pretty big challenge because business cards are not made in the same way. They all have different colors, different fonts, and are even scanned with different backgrounds,”?says the company on its website.
The company elaborates that it uses “heuristic” approach to make the AI understand different fields of a business cards like name, email ID?and addresses.
“By incorporating heuristic principles into Adobe Scan, the app can recognize with high confidence that “joe.smith@adobe.com” is an email address. Our team continues to work on new Adobe Sensei models in Adobe Scan that will quickly recognize more fields like company names and addresses with even higher accuracy,” it added.
This is not the first time Adobe is leveraging cutting edge technologies to improve its mass products like Adobe Scan. The application, which has more than 10 million downloads, recently added Adobe Sensei (an AI and machine-learning platform) and built-in optical character recognition to provide various AI-based features. One of the highlights of the recent update was the ability to detect documents in the phone gallery.