Mitek enabling camera phone image input across dozens of mobile apps

Mitek Systems’ mobile imaging service has become a big hit with the banks and their customers, allowing a depositor to snap a picture of a check with a camera phone and upload their deposit over the mobile Internet. But Mitek has bigger ambitions for its document image processing platform.

Today, Mitek announced that it was expanding from its mobile banking niche into the cloud, creating a developer program and set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow any developer to build photo document processing into their apps. Mitek believes that the software has huge potential in a myriad of consumer and enterprise markets, handling everything from business card scanning and receipt tracking for business expenses to processing handwritten prescription at online pharmacies and invoicing claims from insurance field agents.

Though banks may be its principle customers today, Mitek isn’t exaggerating the huge potential scope of its platform -- if its mobile imagining software is as good as it claims. Image analysis and data extraction is one of the few technologies that can transform analog information from the real world to digital information usable by the virtual world (speech transcription technologies like Nuance’s are another). In short, Mitek can bridge the gap between cyberspace and the real world.

According to a company spokesman, Mitek never licensed its technology in the past. It worked directly with banks to create behind-the-firewall mobile deposit applications on their servers. It has also developed its own smartphone applications such as Mobile Receipt, which documents business expenses simply by snapping images of individual receipts. By planting the software in the cloud and extending an API to developers, Mitek is moving to a licensing model that will allow other developers to innovate, rather than depending on Mitek to build purpose-built apps.

This kind of image processing isn’t for lightweight phone processors though, so Mitek is keeping its core analysis and extraction technology in the cloud, contracting with Amazon to use its EC2 cloud computing platform. The Mobile Imaging Cloud (MIC) software is designed around advanced algorithms and neural network mimicking the neural paths of the human brain.

In application tapping into MIC would use the phones cameras to capture a digital image of a document or object and then send the encrypted image to the cloud processing center. MIC then deciphers and interprets printed text on a document or object, compensating for distortion and shadows while automatically optimizing the images to maximize MIC’s chances of extracting usable data. Once the information is collected, it is sent back to the device or to a transaction center where it is processed like any other data.

Mitek will offer up the platform as a hosted business model, charging developers for each image processing transaction, or it will license the technology directly to developers, depending on how and how often they plan to use its capabilities.