19. An apparatus for populating an electronic form including a processor which performs the method of claim 11 and a graphical user interface which displays a form to be populated, the user interface displaying automatically populated fields for which a determination has been made by the processor to automatically populate the field.
11. A method for populating a form comprising: capturing an image of a physical document; applying optical character recognition to the captured image to identify textual content; tagging candidate text segments in the textual content for fields of the form; for each of a plurality of the fields of the form, estimating a manual entry time and a manual correction time for the field, wherein the estimated manual entry time is an estimated time period for a user to enter a text segment into the field without automatic population and the estimated manual correction time is an estimated time period for a user to correct a text segment in the field after automatic population; and automatically populating a field of the form with the tagged candidate text segment if the field is designated as an automatically populated field, otherwise leaving the field blank, the designation of the field depending on the estimated manual entry time and manual correction time and at least one of: a text length parameter, a predetermined tagging error rate, an optical character recognition error rate, and a field relevance parameter which has been previously assigned to that field.