February 1998
IMAGE PROCESSING BOARDS DO MORE
Image processing boards give you better digital images. The right image processing board can set scanned images entering a production imaging system in motion effectively and quickly. Now they do more for less.
We all know the creed, "All documents are not created equal." Some documents have odd or faint markings, others have strange colors and some documents have been handled by the human hand so often they're filled with creases, tears and smudges. Imaging is the act of transforming a paper image into a digital form -- no matter how hard it is. The process usually starts with a scanner. High-speed scanners feed the data from the scanner bed to a scanner interface board. The data is then sent to the CPU for processing. This can include deskewing, despeckling, rotation, clean-up, OCR/ICR, compression and more. Then the image is set in motion.
High-speed scanners scan a minimum of 60 pages per minute. That's a lot of data hitting your CPU at once. You need a powerful system to handle it effectively. It won't do you any good to quickly get that much data into a system that can't handle it. That's where image processing (IP) boards come in. They do a lot of that work so your CPU doesn't have to.
Image processing boards free up your system to do other functions. IP boards take the brunt of that work and deliver better images to the system. You can't expect a perfect scan every time, but in a large-scale production imaging environment you can't necessarily afford not to. The last thing you want is to be slowed down by a bad scan. IP boards can turn bad scans into good images.
Image processing boards can take the black edges off, automatically straighten out the document and remove smears. They can recognize a barcode that sets the document in motion. After that, the document's information can be stored in a database or used to set off a workflow. IP boards can also improve the overall readability and appearance of the document.
Calling All Boards
Kofax (Irvine, CA 714-727-1733) has a solution for midrange and high-end scanner users. Their family of Adrenaline products let you use software or hardware to process images. The boards are plug-and-play compatible with any PCI based PC. They support both video and SCSI models of scanners.
There are two main boards in the series -- Adrenaline 850 and Adrenaline 1700. Each are available for video and SCSI. Adrenaline 850 ($1,500 SCSI/ $1,700 Video) is rated as a midrange image processing accelerator that scans and processes 100+ images per minute.
The Adrenaline 1700 $3,400 SCSI/$3,600 Video) processes 400+ images per minute.
Kofax achieves their image processing speed and efficiency through point-of-capture processing. Using this technique you can reject poorly scanned documents and instantly make rescan decisions. It performs image cleanup and enhancements and then routes images to the right person to set the clean digital document in motion. You can also create small image files. This speeds up network transfer times and stores more data.
The Imaging Subsystem Engine (ISE) board from Picture Elements (Boulder, CO 303-444-6767) starts at $3,000. It works with scanners or scanning subsystems and provides a grayscale or color data stream in addition to the usual binary data. This gives you more bits of data to recreate the image that you just scanned.
"Grayscale and color imaging has the key advantage of not requiring visual inspection," says Lou Sharpe, Picture Elements' president. Most image quality problems come from converting a scanner's native image into binary format.
"These huge labor savings can more than offset the increased cost of storage for the larger compressed grayscale images," Sharpe says. "While storage gets cheaper every year, unreadable binary images captured today will still be around later."
The ISE board can do grayscale deskew and grayscale scaling. It also handles binary images and simultaneously accepts both types of images.
Give your ISE board more functionality by adding daughterboards. This helps create an imaging system specific to your needs. Add daughter boards with JPEG grayscale or color compression, Group 4 binary compression and JBIG compression for binary and low bit-depth grayscale images.
If you add a thresholding daughterboard to the ISE board you can simultaneously produce three binary images. You can even make new, different binary images at a later time from the grayscale image that was captured during the initial scanning.
Not all documents are thresholded the same. Different documents or different parts of the same document can have multiple needs based on the data type in each section. This daughterboard can permit three different thresholds that you might need to use on specific types of documents. These are described as Normal (N), High (H) and Low (L) sensitivity. A very dirty carbon document would need low sensitivity because otherwise you'll get a dirty binary image that reflects the specks found in the dirty carbon. So you'd want to process the image with "Low" sensitivity to make the binary image that you will see in your computer cleaner.
Normal Sensitivity. Use this setting for 95% to 99% of average document flow. High Sensitivity. This is for hard-to-read characters and marks from light-colored pens and faint pencil markings. Low Sensitivity. Use this option for documents that are not low contrast. An example is clean white paper with clear black type.This daughterboard uses edge thresholding to help you get clearer characters. This is particularly helpful if you're scanning images with characters that are touching and are difficult to break apart. This is useful in distinguishing a "rn" as a "r" and a "n" instead of as a "m" which can often happen when scanning a document with tightly typed words.
Seaport (San Diego, CA 408-366-6400) has the IP20 Image Processor Subsystem ($2,000+). This is a hardware/software combination. It works with many high-speed scanner manufacturers like Bell & Howell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Photomatrix and Visionshape. It can compress up to 300 pages a minute and recognize up to 600 barcodes a minute.
Choose how much RAM you want. It ranges from 4 MB to 64 MB. For even more power, add up to eight boards to one PC. This lets you handle parallel processing and takes the burden off your CPU.
IP boards can come in a do-it-yourself kit. Xionics (Burlington, MA 781-229-7000) recently introduced a new production scanner solution for image processing called ScanKits.
Their imaging processing board runs in the PC at high speed. This lowers the overall price of the product because the scanner hardware doesn't have to be as sophisticated. Each kit can cost between $600 and $4,000 depending on your needs. Pricing is proportionate with the cost of your scanner. If you have a $60,000 high-end scanner, a $4,000 ScanKit is not out of line. It can help you get useful images into your system. You don't want to skimp on costs. You'll save on efficiency and a reduction in rescans.
A ScanKit includes a cable, software, board and manual. The box tells you which scanner each ScanKit will work with so you never have to worry about compatibility. The software they use for the image processing is proprietary to Xionics. They use standard drivers. Use it with sophisticated software or something as simple as Wang's Imaging for Windows viewer. It's up to you. You're not locked into one solution.
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