Systems and methods for automatically processing electronic documents

In a document analysis system that receives and processes jobs from a plurality of users, in which each job may contain multiple electronic documents, to classify each document into a corresponding document category and to extract data from the electronic documents, a method of automatically pre-processing each received electronic document using a plurality of image transformation algorithms to improve subsequent data extraction from said document, the method comprising:

• electronically partitioning each received electronic document page into pieces;
• automatically processing each piece of the received electronic document page using each of a plurality of image pre-processing algorithms to produce a plurality of image variations of each piece;
• and
• analyzing the outputs of subsequent processing and data extraction, on each of the image variations of the pieces to determine which output is best, from the plurality of outputs for each piece;
• automatically extracting data from each received electronic document using a plurality of character recognition engines by automatically processing each received electronic document page using each of a plurality of recognition engines to extract data;
• comparing quality of data extracted from each of the recognition engines to assign a confidence score to the extracted data;
• and,
• selecting extracted data having highest confidence score as the correct extracted data.