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 Technical Notes |
- Programming environments: Win32 visual development environments
- Sample code is included for: C#, VB.NET (Interop), VB6, VC6
- Can be used in any development environment that hosts ActiveX/COM controls or C++ libraries
- All features are available in the ActiveX/COM toolkit
- A subset of the ActiveX/COM toolkit features is currently available within a C++ library
- Process as many as 400-700 document images per minute (2.4 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM) when deskewing, cropping or performing noise or line removal
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| Deskew |
- Accurately deskew color, bitonal and grayscale images
- Returned values will reflect the detected amount of rotation and the confidence value
- Prizm IP deskew does not cause laddering (common in other deskew methods), thus providing cleaner images
- Bitonal deskew with confidence values can process over 400 images a minute for 200 dpi images (running on a 2.4GHz processor with 512 MB RAM)
- Grayscale and color image deskew speeds vary with file size, so DPI plays an important role in speed, but for 200 DPI images of business documents you can expect to deskew 130 images per minute in grayscale and 70 images per minute in color
 
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| Image Cropping |
- Accurately crop color, bitonal and grayscale images
- Data Detection with Confidence Values
- Use when the background color and paper color in a grayscale or color document image are the same
- Use the resulting data detection to center the data in the image, or set margins to a given value, or cut off excess border
- Confidence values allow you to route exception images (images with low contrast or edges that are not sharp and straight) to another cropping method or to an automated operator correction station for exception handling
- Rectangle Crop with Confidence Values
- Find rectangular objects surrounded by a solid or nearly solid border, of a contrasting color, in color and grayscale images (i.e. a dark page on a light background, a light page on a dark background, or a blue page on a green background)
- Border Detection with Confidence Values
- Crop color and grayscale documents of irregular shape
- Find the edges of a scanned image by automatically comparing the object to a specific background value
- Ideal for cropping microfilm/fiche document scans
- Intelligent crop for bitonal images
- Remove black borders
- Remove white borders
- Reduce image file size
- Especially useful on microfilm or small documents that have been overscanned
BITONAL IMAGE CROPPING
 
BEFORE (file size: 100k)AFTER (file size: 15k)
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| Thresholding |
- Convert a color or grayscale image to bitonal
- Fast, accurate thresholding improves OCR read rates
- Fixed thresholding - Allows the programmer to set the threshold value, all pixels above that value are converted to white, those below become black. Very fast, but can produce inferior results.
- Dynamic Global - Analyzes the image to find a threshold and then globally applies that threshold to all pixels in the image
- Dynamic Local - Analyzes the image to find a threshold, adapts the threshold for the local region around each pixel and then applies the individual thresholds to each pixel in the image.
BEFOREAFTER
- Invoice Thresholding
- Clean up background gradients, regions of inverse text and noisy carbonless copies
- Inverse text correction for color regions improves OCR read rates of header data
- Automatically adjust for background gradients and regions of inverse text
BEFOREAFTER
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| Brightness/Contrast Correction |
- Both automatic and manual brightness correction available
- Global Brightness Correction
- Designed to work with document images, automatically pushing the background towards white and making the data darker
- Adaptive Brightness Correction
- Designed to get more information out of photographic images, performing brightness mapping across the image
- Designed for gray or color images, to increase the contrast and brighten the image when the background has white scratches, banding or other variations
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| Auto Rotate |
- Automatically rotate color, grayscale and bitonal document images
- Identify likely text regions and pass those clipped areas to your OCR engine, determining rotation based on confidence values
- Images with low confidence values can be routed automatically for operator review
- Improve the speed of rotation by allowing Prizm IP to select small regions of likely text
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| Blank Page Detection |
- Blank Page Detection supports bitonal (black/white), grayscale and color document images
- Automatically identify and remove blank pages
- Use blank pages as separators for multi-page TIFF documents
- Choose to ignore information in page margins (like hole punches), with settings that decide how "dirty" the blank image can be
- Use settings to ignore border data on over-scanned images and choose to identify pages with minimal content as blank
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| Color Drop |
- Drop and extract multiple colors in a single pass
- The Color Drop module offers two methods for dropping and extracting colors, supporting grayscale as well as full color images: VirtualBulb Drop and Proximity Drop.
- VirtualBulbTM Drop - drop and extract specific hues from a color image to mimic color drop bulbs in scanners, returning a grayscale image
- Powerful function for forms with white backgrounds
- Retain the original image for archive or forms analysis reasons, while also being able to produce the best possible image for OCR
- Drop or extract wide or narrow ranges of color
- Choose multiple hues to be dropped simultaneously
- Adjust for variances in the hue to be dropped, allowing you to adjust automatically for scanner changes over time.
- The output is a gray image
- Proximity Drop - drop or extract specific RGB colors from an image, leaving other, similar shades in place. It affects only the colors closest to a selected color in the RGB color space.
- In an image where bright, saturated red needs to be dropped, but pink and dark red need to remain, Proximity Drop would convert only the bright, saturated red. The pink and dark red will remain. Proximity Drop extracts colors, and also drops colors with no hue, such as black, white, and gray shades. Proximity Drop is the best choice when working with forms that have a background other than white. Shown here is the removal of a specific shade of blue. Notice how the second box is now white. Proximity Drop gives you more control, but allows less room for error in choosing the actual color range to drop.
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| Color Find |
- Sort and index using color
- Report color values and locations to improve automated processes
- Locate regions of color on a page, allowing you to use the information to sort or index document images based on color content, regardless of whether you plan to archive the document image in color or in black and white
- TMSSequoia research has shown that colored markers can be a very reliable way to mark black and white documents for sorting. You can also locate highlighter marks, extract the highlighted text and drop the highlighter before thresholding for archival purposes.
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| Image Detergent |
- Specifically designed to improve color document images for viewing or image processing
- Reduce background noise while preserving characters
- Sharpen images by finding the most common colors and removing the variations in those colors
- Can also be used with specific color values, and is often useful when dropping paper color before thresholding an image
- Can remove the variations caused by image bleed through without degrading individual characters
- Can decrease file size up to 20% depending on the image and scanner used, without impacting OCR results like many smoothing filters
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| Image Filters |
- Reduce noise on color or grayscale document images
- Filtering allows you to change the values of individual pixels based on the values of surrounding pixels. There are several predefined filter types, plus you can define your own filters to apply to the image.
- On color images, these filters work on the red, green, and blue planes individually. Select a filter type in the table below for an explanation and example of a processed image.
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| Compression & File Formats |
- Decompression (viewing):
- TIFF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, CALS / C4 / JEDMICS, GIF, PCX, BMP, and more
- Compression (and conversion):
- Bitonal: Group 3, Group 4, LZW-Uncompressed
- Color: JPEG, LZW Packbits, Raw
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| Forms Processing |
- Support for Grayscale, Color and Bitonal image processing
- Identify thousands of forms with accuracy
- Manage thousands of templates and add new templates on the fly
- Template-based form identification, registration, color mark sense and Intelligent Document Language (IDL).
- Add on FormSuite, SmartScan Xpress Barcode and/or SmartScan Xpress ICR/OCR/OMR to develop extremely accurate and powerful forms processing applications
- Structured Forms
- Used to create, design and publish your own paper forms
- Used when you know where all relevant fields are and have a certain amount of control over format.
- Design forms for your scanner and software (i.e. retail lockbox coupons, applications, tax forms).
- Includes extremely accurate forms identification and registration, and powerful extraction methods that adjust for small variances in form data generated by the printing or scanning process
- So powerful, the underlying technology was used to register forms in the largest data capture project in history (the Decennial Census).
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| Logo Recognition |
- Identify company logos or other features on a document image
- Use as a recognition aid with template identification when more than one company uses the same invoice template
- Use to help locate features on a page for quick form set-up
- Reliably find bubbles on test forms and boxes on questionnaires
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| Projections |
- Quickly identify regularly shaped objects like timing marks on forms for fast ID and registration purposes.
- Use projections on printed forms that contain timing marks to increase the throughput of your forms processing system, while having the backup of Prizm IP's full page identification for images which return low confidence values.
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| Intelligent Document Logic (Black Object Detection) |
- Identify regions of image content and return their locations
- Process data by zones or by characteristic
- Intelligently extract even the most difficult data
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| DMR® (Digital Mark Recognition) |
- Recognize filled-in checkmark boxes and circles on color and grayscale images
- DMR systems support image-based forms processing significantly improving recognition accuracy
- Provides a viable alternative to hardware-based OMR scanners, designed to reduce the costs of form printing and optimize error correction
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| Edition Descriptions |
Prizm IP Bitonal/Grayscale/Color provides bitonal, grayscale and color support for deskew, cropping, thresholding, brightness/contrast correction, autorotate, blank page detection, color drop, color find, image detergent, image filters, compression, and decompression. For Bitonal only see ScanFix Xpress.
Prizm IP Bitonal/Grayscale/Color plus Forms Processing provides bitonal, grayscale, and color image processing features PLUS forms processing. |
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