Events

  • AASLH Annual Meeting

    September 10-11, 2008
    Rochester Convention Center
    Rochester, NY

  • Frankfurt Book Fair

    Frankfurter Buchmesse
    October 15 - October 19, 2008
    Frankfurt, Germany

  • GITEX

    October 19-23, 2008
    UAE
    Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre

  • GTEC 2008

    October 28-29, 2008
    Ottawa
    Westin Hotel
    Ristech Booth 1012

  • IMS Online

    December 2008
    London, UK

Image Processing and Conversion


What happens to an image once it's captured? Some may think that the entire goal of digitization is purely to record and preserve an image. And that is one valuable goal. But there are several choices and options beyond that point.

A converted image may well be huge and may need to be resized for easier readability or transfer. Artifacts and discoloring may need to be removed or corrected. Clients may wish to make the files accessible in a variety of formats -- as Word documents or PDF files or in OpenOffice format. The image may need to be readied for production as a digital e-book, or for print on demand production.

In short: the newly captured file has many possible roads it can take. And part of Kirtas' services is to make it quickly accessible in the formats the client requires.

 

Image Processing

Once Kirtas' APT devices capture an image, the next step is to process it. Our BookScan editor Software is used. These are the key steps:

Template Creation

Upon being digitized, the book is moved into the template phase of the KILTS workflow process.  A template is configured for the book by the Book Scan Editor application, which sets the parameters of a left page and a right page.  

Once the template is complete, the Book Scan Editor application updates the KILTS database which follows the books throughout the digitization process, and establishes that the book is ready for the processing phase.

Processing and Post-Processing

The Process Launcher application monitors the KITLS database for books that are ready for processing.  When books are updated in the database, the Launcher opens the SuperBatch program which can run multiple books at the same time time using the previously saved template files.  

After being processed, the books are flagged. The folder containing the newly rendered files is moved to a quality control folder, and the original scanned images are preserved.

 

Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Our proprietary KILTS workflow workflow system employs a three step quality inspection process involving KILTS software which is tightly integrated into the BookScan Editor process:

1. Image quality is checked throughout the image capture process.

2. Every page is inspected for basic quality attributes such as resolution, color, skew, noise, speckle, missing pages, duplications, and so on

3. The Quality Assurance process also inspects the first 20 pages, the last 20 pages, and 15% of the pages selected at random.

In addition, three different production people review the pages for errors, and Kirtas software tracks and validates that every page is digitized and included in the final document.

The KILTS software not only keeps track of errors, but records any corrections made as well.

And this information can be sorted and viewed in real time by our clients so that information about the status of the books is always available, complete, and up to date.


OCR File Creation and METS/ALTO Output

Using BookScan Editor Pro, the files are then processed through Abbyy OCR Manager. Six simultaneous outputs can be selected including two PDF’s, Microsoft Word, XML, Text layout and Alto.

The Book Scan Editor application simultaneously performs image indexing services, which include but are not limited to:

  • Layout analysis, optical character recognition, and ICR structure recognition
  • Metadata creation using proprietary technology to create METS/ALTO output.