Toolkits in Action

Imaging toolkits let you create your own customized imaging apps without writing all the code yourself. Here are some success stories of toolkit handiwork.

There are a lot of them from many independent vendors, and they are affordable, ranging in cost from several hundred to a few thousand dollars. However, they have some requirements of their own. To integrate them into an existing application, an end user will need the technical resources, programming expertise and the development time necessary to support the effort.

Leading software developers frequently incorporate components of toolkits in their products to cut down on development time. For example, toolkit leader AccuSoft of Wesborough, MA, has licensed its ImageGear and new ImageGear Java toolkits to top developers, including Information Management Research, IBM and Xerox.

Document imaging and management developer Docuworm uses the LeadTools kit from Lead Technologies in Charlotte, NC. While toolkits make life easy for programmers, Victor Ciccarelli, CIO of San Diego, CA-based Docuworm, says that most imaging system customers shy away from them.

ýYou can do some great things with these tools, but you need people who understand the language,ý Ciccarelli says. ýWe could develop the same products ourselves, but it would take my programmers the next year to develop the exact same tools we buy from others. Using these toolkits allows me to cut my development time dramatically. I can compete with the big vendors for a whole lot less money.ý

While your goal may not be to compete as a software developer, the same advantages are available to any organization with on-staff programming expertise. Hereýs how five companies tackled their imaging needs with versatile, low-cost toolkits.

Imaging SupportsPrint on Demand

CSS Publishing in Lima, OH, publishes an average of 140 new titles a year, but one of its divisions, Books on Demand (BOD), specializes in reprinting limited quantities of books that have gone out of print.

According to Tim Runk, vice president of sales and marketing at CSS, an average press run for BOD is between 50 and 100 copies of, for example, an academic text that is unavailable but is still used by a professor. A press run of this size would be prohibitively expensive with standard offset printing. CSS uses imaging technology to fill this niche demand.

When a customer sends CSS a book to be reprinted, the book is cut apart and each page is scanned using a Xerox Docuimage 620S scanner. The TIFF files of each page are imported into a page layout program, and the complete book is printed on a Xerox 6135 600 dpi high-speed laser printer. If quantities warrant, the page images can be output to film and the book printed on CSSýs offset presses. The digitized book is stored on optical disk.

Runk says CSS chose ScanFix tools from TMS Sequoia of Stillwater, OK, to deliver the best image to the page layout program.

ýWhen you scan in a book, youýre scanning the whole page with a lot of white space surrounding the text,ý Runk explains. ýWe use ScanFixýs intelligent crop option to crop out the margins. When we import the pages into the page layout program the margins are already set. If the text image is free of white space, we donýt have to position each image. ScanFix will also deskew an image, which we use on everything we do.ý

Runk says that ScanFixýs despeckle and auto-rotate features also come in handy, while batch processing features let CSS organize each book project.

ýIf we have 250 pages in a folder--250 TIFF files--we send the folder to ScanFix and it will do the whole process in about five minutes on one of our Pentium II 400 MHz processors,ý he says.

Not only is the process economical for customers, but CSS has found internal benefits in terms of inventory control. An average first print run for one of CSSýs new titles may be 2,000, of which 1,500 may be sold in the first year.

ýIf you take 140 to 150 titles a year and multiply that by 500 copies, youýre adding a lot of inventory,ý Runk explains. ýNow we print 2,000 covers for every book but only print 500 to 700 copies of the text on the first run. We save the extra covers until we need a reprint. It has saved us and our customers money--they donýt have to invest in a full print run, we donýt have to warehouse the books.ý

Canadian Library Protects Image Copyrights

Rapid development was the reason Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), a department of the National Research Council in Ottawa, Ontario, chose a toolkit from VisionShape of Orange, CA, to prototype an electronic document delivery system.

CISTI is a library and reference service supporting Canadian industry and medical institutions. When clients request documents, they are scanned and delivered in printed or electronic form.

According to David Clark, systems librarian, CISTI faced two challenges: first, encouraging electronic document delivery over the Web to cut down on printing and courier costs, and second, ensuring the protection of copyrights on electronic documents.

CISTI customers are entitled to only a single copy of copyrighted documents. When they are delivered on paper, copyright fees are calculated and added to the charge. Duplicates must be ordered separately. But CISTI had no standard for copyright protection for documents delivered electronically.

ýPeople can place orders from our catalog at our Web site [www.cisti.nrc.ca/cisti/ cisti.html],ý Clark says. ýWeýre trying to offer delivery options, such as email or Web interface. To do that, weýre looking at developing a viewer application that would allow customers to view and print a document but that wouldnýt allow them to make extra copies.ý

The goal is to deliver a modified TIFF document that canýt be used in a standard TIFF viewer. Once a client receives and prints the document, it will be automatically erased from the clientýs PC.

Clark had numerous tools to choose from, but picked the Web image viewer from VisionShape as the one that most closely met his requirements.

ýI could immediately just plug it in and start setting parameters for the controls -- I was off to the races,ý Clark says. ýWeýre sort of fast-tracking this application. We needed a proof of concept as quickly as possible.ý

Clark says CISTI could have turned the project over to its internal systems staff. They would have done a detailed investigation of the options and built an ironclad application, but it would have taken a long time.

ýThe world of electronic documents is evolving so quickly itýs like trying to hit a moving target,ý Clark says. ýA year from now, clients could be looking for something different. We need to deliver what we can as fast as we can. One of my requirements was a viewer with Active X controls that would let me offer something right now.ý

Riley Stores Extra-long Images

Riley Electric Log, based in Oklahoma City, OK, had a unique need. The company is a repository for oil and gas well logs -- the recorded graphs, up to 250 feet long, of rock formations made as a well is drilled. Comparisons of existing logs provide geologists with valuable information for future exploration. Currently, Riley has a library of four million well logs available for sale to geologists and exploration companies.

Traditionally, Riley has acquired logs on paper and transferred them to film, but storage is cumbersome. According to Dave Rose, director of technology, filmed logs took up 20,000 square feet in a 26,000-square-foot storage facility.

The company developed its own proprietary system, called Crossview, to scan, archive and retrieve logs stored as TIFF images on optical and magnetic disks in Oklahoma City and Houston. The biggest challenge was the size of the images.

According to Rose, there were only three tools available that could read an image as long as some of the well logs. Last year, he chose ImageLib from Skyline Tools (Woodland Hills, CA) to include in a new version of Crossview.

ýImageLib with ActiveX is what weýre basing our new version on,ý he says. ýThe old version was a Visual C ++ based product. The new one is Visual Basic and ActiveX-based. The ImageLib tools seem to be superior in both image manipulation and drawing tools.ý

With Crossview, geologists can put up to 64 logs on a screen, line them up side by side, and add drawings and annotation of their own without modifying the original image. Images and composite images can be printed on a plotter as support documentation for new exploration.

Execomp Customizes Image Processing

For Execomp, a Boulder, CO-based imaging service bureau, flexibility was a top priority. The company scans documents from mixed media, stores digitized images on CD-ROM and returns them to customers with its own retrieval and viewing software, Exeview. For instance, for a local government body regulating construction projects, Execomp may scan mylar site maps on large-format scanners along with hundreds of pages of standard-sized supporting documents.

ýWe do all our scanning using software and toolkits from Pixel Translations,ý says John Franco, Execomp president. ýIt lets me have the same scanner interface on all my scanners. It supports nearly every scanner you can use, especially the high-end ones, and, as far as I can tell, itýs more reliable than the scanning software that comes with the scanners.ý

According to Franco, the toolkits from San Jose, CA-based Pixel Translations enable Execomp to write custom scanning programs. ýWe know the way we work best, what works fastest for us and what would improve our productivity,ý he explains. ýWe customize the scanning software to do exactly that.ý

The toolkit incorporates functions that will deskew, remove black borders, autocrop, remove lines and halftones, etc. Franco says that demanding image processing applications sometimes require a subsequent run, rather than accomplishing everything in one step during scanning. ýDepending on how fast the computer is, you may have to do it as a secondary process,ý he explains. ýThatýs not a problem for us. Thatýs what nighttime is for--to run batch jobs.ý

BankBoston Tackles Check Image Processing

At BankBoston in Boston, MA, more than one million checks are scanned every day using IBM hardware and software from Check Solutions of Memphis, TN. When checks are scanned theyýre encoded with dollar amount and account number. The images are saved for five days in DASD and the physical checks are fed to a sorter.

According to Scott Hillman, senior systems consultant at BankBoston, the images are used primarily for exception processing, such as overdrafts, wrong account numbers, suspected fraud or stop payments.

ýIn the past, a report would be spit out in the morning and people would have to find the physical checks by hand,ý Hillman says. ýSince they had to go through the sorting run, the checks werenýt available until after 10 a.m., and then it was possible that more than one person was looking for the same check for multiple exceptions. It was a terrible process.ý

Last year, BankBoston customized its Check Solutions application with new capabilities from the RasterMaster toolkit from Snowbound Software of Newton, MA. The toolkit was used to make images available from a DB2 database.

ýWeýve taken Snowboundýs viewer and wrapped it into our application so that when we pass the image down to the desktop, it does decryption on the fly,ý Hillman says. ýThe checks arenýt TIFF images. Theyýre in a format from IBM called ABIC. But we donýt have to be concerned with that. It is able to determine what the image format is and put it on the screen. They also provide various tools for manipulating the image -- zooming in and out, and rotating it for printing. It dovetailed into our code easily and has wonderful functionality.ý

Employees now enter an account number from their desktops, receive a list of all checks for the account for that day and then select the check image they want to see. If a check needs to be returned, they pass the information back to the sorters, which separate the checks into pockets according to the bank they are to be returned to.

ýWe now go through the process without anyone touching the actual check from end to end,ý says Hillman. ýIt has saved a tremendous amount of time. Our productivity and morale have gone way up.ý

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