ScanFix Xpress ActiveX

What's new in ScanFix Xpress Version 6

• Automatic Color Detection - analyzes image content then recommends if images should remain color or can safely be converted to bitonal
• Automatic Binarization - greatly improved for color and grayscale images
• Brightness and Contrast Adjustment - on color and grayscale images
• Color Drop - to remove specified colors from an image
• Image Detergent - reduces color noise and variation - great for removing JPEG compression artifacts around characters
• Virtual Bulb - emulates a color dropout scanner
• Deskew, Border Removal, Blank Page/Rectangle Detection, Dilate/Erode, and more - now available for color and grayscale images
• 64-bit (AnyCPU) Support for .NET - Build applications targeting both 64-bit and 32-bit Windows .NET architectures

ScanFix Xpress ActiveX:

• Color, grayscale, and bitonal image cleanup
• Improve content recognition accuracy
• Create smaller compressed files

When standard enhancement and cleanup aren't enough, and your scanned documents seem beyond repair, ScanFix Xpress is the SDK for the job. Building on Accusoft's 20 years of image enhancement patents, research, and development, ScanFix Xpress SDK delivers industry-leading color, grayscale, and bitonal image cleanup, and boasts a collection of image enhancement options.

Using the cleanup and enhancement features that ScanFix Xpress has to offer, you can easily improve the results of your scanned images, reduce file sizes, and prepare your images for further processing, such as OCR.

• Color Deskew and Crop
• Color Detect with Automatic Binarization
• Color Drop
• Image Detergent
• Image Filters
• Noise Removal and Character Smoothing
• Dot Shading Removal
• and more

ActiveX Technical Notes

• Programming environments include: Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and other Win32 visual development environments
• Deployment environments include: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7; Server 2000 / 2003 / 2008
• Sample code is included for:
• VB6
• VS 2005 and VC++
• VS 2008 and VC++
• Applications created with ScanFix Xpress (ActiveX edition) can be deployed on 64-bit or 32-bit CPUs as a 32-bit application
• Can be used in development environments that host ActiveX controls
• Confidence values available for many cleanup operations
• Can be used in multi-threaded applications
• Includes 6 controls: ScanFix Xpress v6, ImagXpress Document v9, NotateXpress v9, ThumbnailXpress v2, TwainPRO v4, and PrintPRO v3

Color Detect & Auto Binarize
Color Detect:

• Allows for mixed document color scanning applications containing both color and black and white documents
• Analyzes 24-bit images looking for significant amounts of saturated color data
• Recommends if color images can safely be converted to bitonal

Auto Binarize:

• Provides improved automatic conversion of 8-bit and 24-bit grayscale and color images to black and white
• Automatic mode analyzes images to determine best binarization methods and settings
• Offers user-configurable options to fine tune results

Color Removal
Color Drop:

• Locates specified RGB colors in 24-bit images and drops those colors to white or a specified color
• Identifies pixels to change based on proximity to user-specified color values
• Provides very precise control over color manipulation
• Supports color conversion and color blending to target color

Virtual Bulb ®:

• Performs software-based HSV color dropout on 24-bit images, emulating a hardware-based dropout scanner through much more powerful and flexible technology
• Allows multiple hues and ranges within hues to be dropped to white and adjacent colors to fade into shades of gray
• Compensates for variations in color saturation and brightness caused by printing environments

Image Detergent ® & Filters
Image Detergent:

• Cleans up noise and variations in specified colors in 24-bit color images
• Flattens each color region to a specified color by adjusting each color region to its center point
• Offers an automatic mode to clean dominant colors or can specify color list
• Removes JPEG compression artifacts commonly found around characters in scanned color documents
• Allows multiple colors to be adjusted without increasing processing time
• Removes JPEG compression artifacts commonly found around characters in scanned color documents

Filters:

• Applies various filter operations to 8-bit and 24-bit images
• Offers a variety of options including smoothing filters (Gaussian, median, average), sharpening filters (unsharp mask), morphological filters (dilate, erode, open, close), edge detection filters (Laplacian, Prewitt), and provision for user defined convolution filters

Page Enhancement
Color Deskew:

• Automatically straightens crooked 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Reports correction angle in a fraction of a second, based on image contents, not document perimeter or border
• Offers user configurable High Quality vs. High Speed setting

Auto Border Crop:

• Automatically converts dark borders to white or removes border completely on 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Reduces image file size (physical dimensions and compressed file size)
• Automates border crop (user configurable to report or automatically correct)
• Use on microfilm/microfiche scans or small document images

Blank Page / Blank Rectangle Detection:

• Identifies and reports blank pages, or blank areas of interest, on 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Configures settings to accommodate bleed-through or noisy images (i.e. ignore hole punches)
• Increases storage capacity by eliminating blank pages

Image Registration:

• Registers the image "contents" to be a specified distance from the top and/or left side of the page
• Applies to 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Use with zonal recognition to establish the position of the text

Character Enhancement
Character Completion & Smoothing:

• Repairs, smoothes, and thickens incomplete characters on 1-bit images
• Performs well on poor dot matrix text
• Smoothes ragged edges on letters

Dilate and Erode:

• Thickens or thins objects in 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Apply horizontal, vertical, or diagonal adjustments
• Increases recognition accuracy in lightly printed or very thick text

Hole Punch & Line Removal
Hole Punch & Blob Removal:

• Removes hole punches and larger areas of black on 1-bit images
• Enables user configurable threshold settings

Line Removal:

• Automatically removes solid or broken lines (horizontal and vertical) from scanned forms and documents on 1-bit images
• Automatically repairs text that intersects with lines (fill broken characters), essential for accurate OCR / ICR and forms processing

Comb Removal (commonly used in ICR forms):

• Automatically removes data entry combs from forms in 1-bit images
• Automatically repairs text that intersects with lines (fill broken characters), essential for accurate ICR

Background Cleanup
Noise Removal:

• Removes random specks or noise on 1-bit images
• Performs speck removal based on user-specified speck size

Dot Shading Removal:

• Automatically removes dot shading for improved OCR accuracy on 1-bit images
• Removes scanner noise caused by colored backgrounds
• Significantly reduces compressed file sizes without destroying text

Text Correction
Auto Inverse Text Correction:

• Detects and automatically converts inverted text zones on 1-bit images
• Changes white-on-black text to normal black-on-white

Auto Negate:

• Analyzes 1, 8, and 24 bit images to determine if they are inverted (light text on dark background, dark text on light background)
• Offers automated correction to reverse colors, if needed (user configurable to report or automatically correct)

Adjust Brightness & Contrast

• Analyzes and corrects the brightness and contrast of 8-bit grayscale and 24-bit color document
• Corrects the image using either a globally applied brightness remapping or adaptive remapping

Additional Image Processing

• Performs Flip, Mirror, Rescale, Rotate, and Shear on 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Offers Smooth-Zoom to double the width and height of a 1-bit image and smooth objects for better recognition (ideal for improving barcode and OCR results)

Sub-Image Processing

• Applies to 1, 8, and 24-bit images
• Separates out an area, from the original document image, prior to image processing
• Speeds up processing and outputs only the smaller area of interest

ScanFix Xpress includes the following components:

• ScanFix Xpress for image cleanup
• ImagXpress for image compression/decompression and display
• NotateXpress for adding image annotations
• PrintPRO for printing
• ThumbnailXpress to view thumbnail images
• TwainPRO to acquire images from TWAIN devices