Excalibur's PixTex: a retrieval alternative; pattern recognition approach being combined with page-image retrieval. (Excalibur Technologies' PixTex/EFS electronic filing and retrieval system) (The Latest Word) (product announcement)

Excalibur's PixTex: a retrieval alternative Excalibur Technologies of McLean, Virginia, has announced the release of PixTex/EFS, an electronic filing and retrieval system for Digital Equipment Vax and Ultrix platforms. The system is an extension of Excalibur's Savvy/TRS and PixTex indexing and retrieval software that looks for patterns in binary data instead of exact string matches in text.

Excalibur's technology offers an interesting alternative to conventional full-text retrieval systems. It is especially useful in retrieving information from OCR-scanned documents.

Excalibur was founded in 1980 by Jim Dowe for the purposes of developing products based on Dowe's research in computer-assisted pattern recognition. Initially, Dowe developed technology for custom contracts. By 1987, Excalibur began selling its indexing and retrieval as a commercial package--Savvy/TRS.

About a year ago, Excalibur introduced PixTex as a commercial product. PixTex adds linking of images to Savvy/TRS, as we'll explain below.

How it works. We ran PixTex through a test application at Seybold Seminars '91, where Excalibur introduced PixTex/EFS. Our test was finding relevant information in the New Products Showcase Guide, which was handed out to conference attenders.

We began by scanning the document with an OCR scanner. Excalibur used a Calera CDP 9000, but most popular OCR scanners are supported. …