| |
 
Page Improver® is a registered trademark of 4DigitalBooks
- ASSY SA.
Introduction :
Page Improver® is a software for automatic image
processing of scanned pages and a fundamental production tool for digitization
of books and bound documents. It is the ideal complement to any book
scanner.
It is designed for fast processing of sequential images of scanned
pages from books, bound documents and lose sheets. It produces a set
of typical treatments that are necessary to prepare pages for OCR and
for online publishing.
Key features of Page Improver® include ability
to automatically follow evolution of pages as they shift
and rotate under the camera over time of scanning. Page Improver®
detects precisely position of gutter and dimensions of pages to split
pages and crop outer borders with an extraordinary precision.
Page Improver® reduces substantially operator
interventions on image processing and greatly improves production capacity.
Source images :
While a single sheet document is usually scanned by a single camera
scanner, a bound document may be scanned with a single camera or a dual
camera scanner. Following source images are accepted :
|
|
|
single pages |
dual pages on single images |
left and right pages on two images |
Source images are usually raw image scans of pages presenting artifacts
and defects.
| Typical artifacts: |
- a dark border around the page
- a view of the gutter at binding of pages
- shadows of page curvature close to the binding |
| Typical defects: |
- skewed text (text not being horizontal, usually due to rotation
of page)
- bleed through (print that appears by transparency from the back
side of the page)
- dark page background |
Page Improver® removes these artifacts and defects,
to enhance aspect and readability of document. Processing is optimized
for speed without compromise on quality. A book may be processed faster
than any automatic book scanner may produce raw images. This enables
a book scanner operator to run Page Improver® in
parallel to the book scanning task.
Improvements on pages:
Page Improver® produces the following essential
treatments:
| Page Split : |
Separates left and right pages in two images, taking
into account the presence of spine on the image. |
| Page Crop : |
Crops to individual pages, by taking away black borders and artifacts
associated to presence of spine. |
| Page Deskew : |
Corrects rotation of grayscale and color text
on pages, that delivers a page with horizontal text lines when the
source image presents an angle following to imperfect turning of pages
or following to prints with incorrect angle. Our deskew method works
also on pages with very small amounts of text, pages with graphics
and tables.
|
| Page Unbleed : |
Suppresses text that appears by transparence from the back side
of page, corrects density of text, corrects contrast of photos,
clarifies background of page by removing darkness of aged paper
for example.
|
| Page Resize : |
Resizes pixel matrix to a different size and corrects DPI factor.
This is very useful when one wants to scan at fixed resolution but
provide images on different resolutions. This feature does over-sampling
and provides better aspect of text when converting images to bitonal
(threshold).
|
| Page Threshold : |
Converts images to black and white, that is useful for all monographs
or books that include only text and line art images or gravures. |
| Page Join : |
Assembles two images of left and right pages in order to make
a dual page image. |
| Page Canvas : |
Applies a selected canvas size to all images of the document,
resulting in uniform page format output. |
| Page Center : |
Centers horizontally content of pages on canvas. This allows left
pages and right pages to appear in a similar way. Usually on source
images left pages present larger left margin and right pages, larger
right margin. Browsing sequentially left and right pages on the
screen of a computer results on a continuous right and left shifting
of page content that is undesirable for online presentation of documents.
|
| Image Formats : |
INPUT |
| File format |
Compression |
| TIFF |
None, LZW, CCITT G4 |
| JPG |
Any |
| BMP |
None |
|
| |
OUTPUT |
| TIFF |
None, LZW, CCITT G4 |
| JPG |
Any |
|
| Image Colors : |
Input and Output images may be bitonal B&W, 256
gray scales or color RGB. |
| Page Sizes : |
Page Improver is able to handle very large source images, such
as color scans of newspapers for example (file size of a single
A2 format page in 300 dpi RGB is about 100 Mb). |
User Interface
User interface is composed of a page navigator, an image treatment
configurator and an output preview pane and a lens.
Other Features
| Step by Step / Batch mode: |
Page Improver® may work in page
by page or in batch mode. Page by page allows fine tuning image
treatment on sequential pages while batch mode allows to run settings
on a whole set of pages. |
| Use of Presets : |
Presets may be stored in a profile with all configured image treatment
settings for a book that represents a typical collection. This profile
may be used to process all the books of this collection, thus saving
significantly operator time. |
| Multi-Processor Licensing : |
On a single multi-processor system, our license allows to run as
many instances of Page Improver® to simultaneously
treat several books. |
| Installation Requirements : |
CPU : Pentium IV (Core2Duo recommended)
RAM : 1GB
Hard Disk space used by the application: about 5MB
Screen resolution 1280x1024 or better.
|
Why is Page Improver better than other solutions ?
Page Improver implements a set of image treatment methods dedicated
for scanned pages that are unequalled per their efficiency and speed
performance, resulting in higher throughput and less operator interventions.
- Page-splitting and page-cropping - independent
of page position and angle
| |
It's ability to automatically follow evolution of
pages as they shift and rotate under the camera over time of scanning
allows Page Improver® to detect precisely position
of gutter and dimensions of pages to split. This is essential to
reduce subsequent interventions on scanned images to remove artifacts
of page borders. |
- Polyvalent deskew - independent of page content
| |
Many deskew implementations in commercial products
are limited to pages with large text blocks. When graphics or tables
appear in these documents, or when pages have only few words, these
deskew methods produce unexpected results resulting in wrong rotated
pages. Working with such tools requires inspection of results that
is an expensive and time consuming task. |
|
