Patent ID: 7120616

Claim:
A method for specifying executing and analyzing method sequences for the recognition of dispatch labels and form entries, comprising the steps of: completing a specification phase describing plural individual processing steps of a method sequence for optical recognition of a data-filled form from one of a dispatch label and a form entry; developing a graphical representation of each processing step of the method sequence, the method sequence input in graphical form into a computer system as a flowchart of the steps, each processing step corresponding to a separate flowchart block, each of the flowchart blocks having attributes and function details which define the influence of individual variables on that step of the method sequence; compiling the graphical representation, with codes being automatically generated from the flowchart as an internal representation which is converted by means of a compiler into a loadable, executable module including each processing step for recognizing data filled into the respective dispatch label or form entry; using the module, performing a handling phase for recognition of optically scanned data from each data field of a scanned data-filled form, the handling phase comprising, for each of the plural individual processing steps, displaying a corresponding one of the flowchart blocks on the computer together with information for describing the particular current data field and the current values of the attributes written to an attribute file for each processing step associated with the current data field and the current flowchart block of the current processing step; performing an analysis phase, of the scanned data of that data field during each of the individual processing steps during the handling phase wherein each step of the method sequence is reconstructed by displaying the course of the data field processing including the current flowchart block with the attributes together with the associated scanned image of the scanned data-filled form, with the attributes showing the current values from the attribute file for the respective data field being analyzed.