Analysis: Kofax Upgrades an Imaging De Facto Standard

In the world of mainstream document imaging, there are two standards for state- of-the-art image quality and throughput: one is the Perfect Page and iThresholding image processing built into Kodak document scanners, and the other is Kofax Image Product's VirtualReScan (VRS), a popular third-party solution supported by just about every scanner manufacturer, including Kodak. Last week, Kofax brought the state of the art to the next level, introducing VRS 4.0, which adds content-based auto rotation, auto color detection and other features that improve automation.

Reduced document prep time, improved recognition accuracy and higher downstream image throughput are what these image-processing tools are all about. Kodak and Kofax have led the market toward scan-time processes, including auto image cropping as well as auto image deskew and thresholding (exposure control). The former lets you scan mixed-size documents without presorting; the latter improves human readability and automated (OCR/ICR) recognition accuracy. Many scanners now offer similar processing features, but VRS and Perfect Page/iThesholding are still the most advanced and widely used options in the mainstream market. Kofax, for one, claims 50,000 installations of VRS, and the solution's broad acceptance has led even Kodak to obtain VRS certification.

The new features in VRS 4.0 include content-based auto rotation, which automatically turns images to their proper landscape or portrait orientation to improve human and machine readability. Exceptions to a batch may be rare, but these few images would otherwise require sorting at the front or, more likely, downstream manual processing to correct orientation. Auto rotation was introduced last year on Canon's DR-6080 and DR-9080C scanners, but support in VRS means that scores of existing scanners (http://intranet.kofax.com/extra/sc/sc_search.asp?type=A) can gain this functionality.

The premise of the new auto color-detection feature is that certain pages are best scanned in color to preserve the legibility and clarity of the original, yet you don't want to have to scan everything in color and needlessly multiply bandwidth and storage demands. One alternative is switching between color and bitonal scanning "on the fly" with the aid of barcoded separator sheets, but this requires a labor-intensive presorting step. Auto color detection lets you set a threshold of color information that will automatically trigger a switch to color scanning for just that page.

Other improvements in VRS 4.0 include an improved blank-page deletion feature designed to sense bleed through from front-side printing. It's a common problem, particularly when documents are printed on thin paper, but this feature reportedly sees when blank page "noise" closely mirrors a front-side image and appropriately deletes that image.

VRS 4.0 supports most certified scanners up to 50 pages per minute with software-based VRS. Most production-level scanners require a combination of VRS software and Kofax boards in the scanner and host computer. Prices vary based on volume.

— Doug Henschen, Editor, Managing Content