by MEKEL ENGINEERING, INC.

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Many companies and organizations, especially those with document and process-intensive operations, seriously underestimate the productivity value and competitive gain to be had from converting paper, microfilm and microfiche into an electronic image. However, management today is being forced to reboot into the Information Age to survive the external economic and competitive pressures. Without the benefit of electronic information-based systems, those companies will downsize; cutting old processes in conjunction and becoming competitively disadvantaged.

The solution is the leverage technologies of document imaging, workflow and networks which have easily demonstrable success with smaller work forces. In this manner, the organization's strength will be measured by the quantity or quality of the information it possesses or produces, and in its accessibility.

There are a significant number of reasons to implement these technologies: The selection of which depends upon the type of company and the organizational charter.

• Improved customer service/satisfaction
• Departmental consolidation
• Work efficiency
• Increased information access
• Space reduction
• Smaller labor force
• Selective control
• Security
• Back-up
• Up-to-date filing
• Decentralized locations
• Unaided data withdrawals
• Remote access
• Portable record capability
• Less need for materials

When microfilm is mentioned, the discussion is really about microforms. Microforms are: film, fiche and aperture cards. Document images come in all sorts of sizes, shapes and formats, for example; positive/negative images, comic/cine orientation, varying reduction ratios, etc.

The same variations occur with microfiche - and more so. Fiche are 105 mm, approximately 4 in. by 6 in. transparency cards that can hold as few as 1 or 2 images or as many as 420 images.

Aperture cards, about 3 in. by 7 in. cards made of thin cardboard containing a single 35 mm image, typically are used for large format drawings (e.g., engineering). The subject of this Guide is on production film and fiche scanning.

In a high-volume paper conversion, using a paper to film to digital image capture process offers an alternative strategy with key benefits. Creating microfilm from the documents first, then scanning the microfilm can be viewed as the best of both worlds; the hard copy legality and security of microfilm and the convenience of electronic images and - conversion costs are lower in the long run. The well-documented reasons for employing this strategy can be summarized as follows:

• Capturing images from paper into microfilm is very fast and inexpensive.
• Scanning microfilm automatically is very, very fast - up to 6,000 images per hour.
• The combined cost of filming and scanning is less than direct paper scanning due mainly to labor costs. Automatic microform scanners can do the conversion from film to digital storage practically hands free.
• The microfilm has a back-up value.
• Microfilm is legally accepted throughout the world.

The basic components of imaging are; Scanning and Capture, Processing, Storing, and Viewing. The process can be viewed as the flow of film and fiche through scanning, processing, storage, retrieval and communication to users requiring access to the system. MICROFORM SCANNERS There are two general categories of microform scanners: reader scanners, and high-speed scanners.

Reader scanners first appeared on the scene in 1988. They were basically film/fiche reader printers adapted with a digitizer. Their scanning speed was typically 8 sec. per image, half the speed of a photocopier. They were appropriate to the on-demand, low volume application, had relatively lower equipment costs but higher per image cost due to the labor content.

This is where image capture happens in a big way. The first high speed production scanner was introduced in 1988 by MEKEL ENGINEERING. It was designed and built with a single intent - high volume microfilm scanning with a digital output. Where the reader scanner took 8 sec. to scan an image, the high speed scanner was an order of magnitude faster - less than a second. The scanner was more expensive than the reader scanner but it compensated with the greater throughput and automatic operation. As a result, the cost per image was significantly lower.

As is characteristic in any emerging industry, advances in microform scanner systems were driven by rapid changes in interrelated technologies, i.e., enabling technologies. These included but were not limited to; better and faster image compression, mass storage media, high resolution displays, image enhancement and processing algorithms, and electronic cameras that became smaller, faster and more reliable.

These advances added to the system capabilities in five major areas: speed, capture, interface, image enhancement, and image processing.

Speed is regarded in terms of a throughput rate where throughput is defined as the joint operation of scan, enhance, compress, and store. When first introduced in 1988, the Mekel production rollfilm scanner could achieve throughputs of 45 images per minute (ipm) at 200 dots per inch (dpi) resolution. Five years later, the pace increased to 75 ipm. Today, the microfilm scanners are attaining throughputs in excess of 100 ipm.

This increase in speed led to an important side effect; it now became feasible to consider throughput rate tradeoffs for other customer demands such as variable image formats and image quality.

The steadily increasing customer awareness and use of high speed scanner resulted in the demand for the ability to capture a wide variety of film and fiche formats with the acceptance that the rates will vary but high throughputs will nevertheless be sustained. This revelation added to the evolution of the scanner ability to capture a diversity of document sizes, formats, and reduction ratios. Selectable 200 through 400 dpi enhanced the capture capability.

The early microform scanners had clumsy and unwieldy user interfaces. The best of breed in today's scanner systems facilitates operation with the familiar Windows interface to drive automated scanner functions and allow user definable path, file and output options.

Speed is important but no more so than image quality. The current models of Mekel microform scanners incorporate sophisticated image enhancement technology that make the unreadable `readable' and in real time.

Many factors contribute to poor film quality; faded documents, photo copies, carbon copies, duplicated film, improper archival storage, film age, to mention a few. The image enhancement utilizes parameters such as brightness, contrast, line thickness, edge extraction, windows, thresholding and filtering to restore document quality.

The MEKEL scanners allow the operator to randomly or selectably choose images to fine tune the parameters during set-up. Then, while in the production mode, the image enhancement is automatically applied with no penalty in scanning speed.

The final phase of microform scanner operation is image processing. Images may need rotation, cropping, despeckling and/or deskewing in addition to compression. Although high speed scanners can perform image processing during scanning, throughput is impacted. The only alternative, up to now, had been a post-scanning step that required additional time, labor and equipment.

However, a recent and dramatic advancement in image processing introduced in the MEKEL microform scanners is "concurrent processing." Images can now be processed in real time with no slowdown in scanning speed! This provides the fastest possible throughput while at the same time reducing any post-scanning activity. Consider that, on top of these developments, MEKEL scanner data transfer rates are in the double digit megabytes per second range.