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AMS Adviser *
Volume 4 Issue 2 - March/April 1999
Welcome to a new issue of the AMS Adviser.
AMS at IIM Vendor Showcase
Article - The
Continuing Benefits of Aperture Cards
Series - The
Dynamics of Cost in Document Capture.
Plus we have all the usual bits (Funny
Bit? and AMS Services).
AMS
AMS
at the IIM Vendor Showcase
AMS has been a long term member of IIM (Institute for Information Management).
As an active member, AMS along with other leaders in Workflow and Document/Information
Management, have presented at the "IIM Victorian Vendor Showcase 99" on the 23rd
March, 1999 at the Australian Industry Group Building.
The Showcase allowed visitors from all sections of Industry and Government to visit and
listen to various speakers give their ideas on how Information should be handled.
AMS was unique on the day being the only service provider and able to integrate it's
services with any of the other software vendors.
On display AMS had the Canon MS400 Digital Reader Printer,
the Kodak 3500 Scanner with Kodak's Medium Volume Capture
Software, Kodak's CDL144 CD Jukebox, Cornerstone Monitors
and AMS Software.
AMS was assisted by representatives from ACA Pacific and Canon Australia.
The following day, AMS stayed on and presented to existing customers, to further
demonstrate our commitment to staying at the forefront of Imaging Services. We covered in
detail the concerns people had with electronic media as a long term storage medium and
gave examples of how AMS can accommodate their short and longterm storage problems.
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The Dynamics of Cost in Document Capture - Part 6
Use image cleanup to make images more readable and increase OCR
accuracy
There are several techniques that can make images more readable and increase OCR
accuracy. The most effective ones include:
- Deskewing. This technique straightens pages that have been scanned slightly
crooked due to mechanical tolerances in the scanner’s document feeder. Deskewing can
increase the accuracy of OCR by 5-10% or more, which, as we saw above, can make the
difference between using expensive manual indexing and automated OCR indexing.
- Deshading. OCR engines are unable to read words against the gray shaded
backgrounds that are common on forms. Removing shading allows you to OCR zones that are
otherwise unreadable.
- Despeckling and streak removal. These techniques remove small speckles and
streaks caused by dirt in the scanner feeder or noise in the scanner CCDs.
- Line removal. On typewritten forms, words are frequently typed so that they cross
over the lines on the form, which makes them unreadable to OCR. Line removal erases the
lines on the image and then reconstructs the characters so they can be recognized.
- Edge enhancement. This is actually a multiple set of filters that sharpens the
edges of characters. The results are usually invisible to the eye, but they can increase
the accuracy of OCR by as much as 5-10%.
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| Ascent
Capture supports a wide variety of image cleanup options that make images more readable
and increase OCR accuracy. |
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Overall, by applying the proper cleanup functions for different document types, you can
increase OCR accuracy by anywhere from 10-30%. This can easily make the difference between
using OCR profitably and being forced to hand key every index field.
Use bar codes to automate indexing
Bar codes are far and away the best way to automate the indexing of business documents.
A good bar code reading package can read multiple bar codes on a page, at any angle on the
page, with an accuracy of 99.5%+. What’s more, since bar codes have built in error
checking, there’s no need to have operators check the accuracy of the indexing. The
capture software can do it for you.
Of course, not all business processes lend themselves to bar coding. However, you
should consider bar codes if at all possible. They have proven themselves over time to be
one of the fastest, most accurate, and most fault-tolerant forms of indexing.
Next update: Using validation scripts to reduce manual checking.
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The Continuing Benefits of Aperture Cards.
By John Webb of Imation UK Ltd (formerly 3M).
Following the recent shift in focus towards digital technology by Imation Document
Imaging, with our range of PDDMS (Product Data and Document Management Systems) software
solutions and hardware peripherals for engineering document management and distribution,
we are often asked if this means we are abandoning our role, continued since our spin-off
from 3M two years ago, as the world’s largest supplier of 35mm aperture cards.
The answer is a firm "No!"; we strongly advocate the importance of the role
of 35mm microfilm in meeting all the business needs of nearly all of today’s
customers.
Subsequent to research carried out for us across Europe on future trends and attitudes
to 35mm microfilm, we asked a number of the UK respondents what caused them to continue to
use the format. This is a selection of the most common answers:
The 35mm Aperture Card is still the only truly archival storage system – magnetic
media is subject to decay, and optical disk is still unproven in practice despite
assurances of up to 30 years life, which, in many industries, is too short.
Although recent changes in the law have allowed digitally-stored documents to become
admissible as evidence, only the 35mm Aperture Card is considered to have the same weight
of evidence as an alternative to the original drawing. Whilst courts have readily accepted
digital text data, technical drawings are viewed as a totally different subject in law,
due to their complexity and volatility. So, even though many companies do not have any
legal or industry regulations demanding long term archival storage of drawings, in
today’s adversarial legal system, they can leave themselves vulnerable in the event
of, for example, a Product Liability defence.
An Aperture Card library is easily controlled, and available to any person – from
the M.D down to the temp or trainee – at any time, and provides an effective,
readily-accessible back-up against system congestion, when there just isn’t a spare
workstation available. There can also be system downtime when drawings would not be
accessible, and this invariably happens when the need is urgent – an Aperture Card
library will ensure that you need never be without a drawing, when you need it.
Both operating system and application software revisions and upgrades can potentially
corrupt, misread, or make unreadable previously stored archive data. For example, CAD
users have had situations where a certain linestyle, selected and stored in an original
file, has been misinterpreted with expensive, if not disastrous, consequences when that
drawing has been modified at a later date, companies changing from one CAD system to
another have found translation a minefield. Migration can be, in practice, more difficult
than at first believed, and a digital archive can be very vulnerable – so an Aperture
Card library, which can always be scanned, avoids disaster.
Many companies have to deal with customers, contractors or business partners who either
do not have digital technology, have systems that are not compatible, or are located
overseas where support is questionable; the 35mm Aperture Card is a universal standard,
and the technology and support to utilize it is readily available anywhere in the world.
Technology changes are so rapid in computing – and there are few, if any,
migration standards – very few of the data storage media of 5, never mind 10 years
ago, can be accessed on today’s systems; yet the Aperture Card has remained a
constant for 50 years.
Whilst a few companies admitted to "grey areas" existing in certain of the
above cases, all agreed that the automatic archiving to Aperture Card would give you the
peace of mind of immediate, absolute security of your company’s Information and data,
and would also allow you to visually interpret exactly what the designer/engineer saw at
the time he completed the drawing. In addition, an Aperture Card archive provides a simple
and cost-effective disaster recovery system.
Contact AMS for more information.
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Funny Bit?
A couple were married for 40 years. When they were first married the man
said: "I’m putting a box under the bed but you have to promise me that you will
never look in it."
In all their 40 years together, she never looked in the box. In fact, she rarely
thought of it.
However on the afternoon of their 40th anniversary, curiosity finally got the better of
her and she lifted the lid and peeked inside. In the box were three empty beer bottles and
$1,874.25 in small notes and change.
She closed the box and put it back under the bed.
Now that she knew what was in the box, she was doubly curious about it.
That evening they went out to a special dinner. After eating, she couldn't resist any
longer and confessed to her husband. "I’m sorry, but after all those years of
keeping my promise, temptation go the best of me and I looked in the box under the
bed," she admitted. "Now I need to know why you keep empty beer bottles in the
box."
The man paused for a second and said, "After all these years, you deserve to know
the truth, whenever I was unfaithful to you, I put an empty beer bottle in the box to
remind me never to do it again."
His wife was shocked and said, "I am very disappointed and sad but guess after all
those years away from home and on the road, temptation does happen and I guess three times
isn’t bad considering all the years we have been married."
They hugged and made their peace. A little later, the woman asked her husband, "I
can understand the beer bottles but what about all the money?"
To which her husband answered, "Whenever the box got too full of empties, I just
cashed them in"
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AMS Services.
For the complete run down on what AMS can do for you, click on
the following link.
AMS Services
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Next Month
The second issue for Volume 4 we will continue with the last part of the article on the
Dynamics of Cost of Image Capture.
In the next few issues we will have some new articles which will include the following:
- A look at Alchemy’s New Version 6.0.
- Plus other topics of interest.
Plus all the usual bits & pieces.
Should you want a topic covered or need an article in full, please
feel free to contact AMS.
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Go to AMS HomePage.
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