Irvine, California-based Kofax Image Products has launched the Kofax Image Processing Platform, KIPP Image Enhancement, royalty-free tool that cleans up scanned images in real time without the expense of adding a specialised daughter-board dedicated to image processing. The product supplements the Kofax family of Advanced Imaging Extensions for the KIPP Advanced Developers Toolkit and includes deskew, despeckle, black border removal and streak removal functions to improve document capture quality says the company. Deskew aligns images scanned off-centre and can detect and correct skew up to 16 degrees with a resolution of 0.1 degree; despeckle removes black marks produced by carbon or dust as paper is scanned into the system; black border removal eliminates extraneous lines caused by a misaligned automatic document feeder or by scanning paper narrower than the selected paper size; streak removal eliminates the one-to-two-pixel-wide vertical lines sometimes produced during scanning. Image cleanup is the process of electronically straightening documents scanned off-centre and removing extraneous lines or marks. Skewed documents are the leading cause of optical character recognition errors, since the system often misinterprets or cannot identify the slanted text. Electronically straightening these images increases zonal and full-text optical character recognition indexing accuracy by as much as 100%. At the same time, removing incidental marks that frequently appear on images can reduce storage requirements by 10 to 30% and improve document display, according to Kevin Drum, Kofax director of marketing. KIPP Image Enhancement is compatible with any application written using the KIPP Advanced Developers Toolkit and is designed to operate on a standard Kofax document processor board. The company says that all four cleanup processes can be completed typically in under 600mS so that cleanup is accomplished in real time without reducing a scanner’s rated speed. The tool is available now for a one-time, royalty-free cost of $2,000. Other Advanced Imaging Extensions compatible with the KIPP Advanced Developers Toolkit include Bar Code Recognition, Forms Recognition, Job Separation Detection, Mark Sense Detection and Text Annotation.
