Systems and methods of accessing random access cache for rescanning

• US 8,115,969 B2
• Filed: 05/04/2009
• Issued: 02/14/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/24/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Kofax Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Kofax Incorporated
• Inventors: Borrey, Roland G., Schmidtler, Mauritius A. R., Taylor, Robert A., Fechter, Joel S., Asuri, Hari S.
• Primary Examiner(s): Worku, Negussie
• Application Number:
  US12/435,277
• Publication Number:
  US 20090214112A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,016 Days
• Field of Search: 358/474, 358/1.9, 358/1.14, 358/450, 358/1.15, 358/501, 358/505, 358/518, 358/524, 358/448, 358/406, 358/446, 382/254, 382/260, 382261-269, 382/303, 382/167, 382/305
• US Class Current: 358/448
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 1/40 Picture signal circuits H04N1/387 takes precedence

Abstract

An efficient method and system to enhance digital acquisition devices for analog data is presented. The enhancements offered by the method and system are available to the user in local as well as in remote deployments yielding efficiency gains for a large variety of business processes. The quality enhancements of the acquired digital data are achieved efficiently by employing virtual reacquisition. The method of virtual reacquisition renders unnecessary the physical reacquisition of the analog data in case the digital data obtained by the acquisition device are of insufficient quality. The method and system allows multiple users to access the same acquisition device for analog data. In some embodiments, one or more users can virtually reacquire data provided by multiple analog or digital sources. The acquired raw data can be processed by each user according to his personal preferences and/or requirements. The preferred processing settings and attributes are determined interactively in real time as well as non real time, automatically and a combination thereof.

Claims

1. A data processing system comprising:

a random access cache that receives data from a data capture device, wherein the data is stored as one or more data segments within the random access cache and in a manner that is randomly accessible;

a processor in communication with the random access cache, wherein the processor is configured to obtain the data from the random access cache, the processor having processor control settings that are used to process the data stored in the random access cache; and

an acquisition controller configured to analyze the data from the random access cache to determine when to use different processor control settings and wherein the processor randomly accesses the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to process the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

2. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the random access cache stores data and associated metadata.

3. The data processing system of claim 2 wherein the metadata comprises one or more tags identifying the data and the location in the cache.

4. The data processing system of claim 3 wherein the one or more tags comprise a time and date stamp, a sequence number, a beginning of the data segment, an end of the data segment, a height, a width, and a pointer to a next data segment.

5. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the data capture device is a scanner, a camera, an infrared camera, an acoustic camera, a digital camera, a video recorder, a facsimile machine, any device capable of capturing an image, an acoustic sensor, or any device having an acoustic sensor.

6. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the acquisition controller is configured to analyze the data by applying at least one image processing algorithm.

7. The data processing system of claim 6, wherein the image processing algorithm is a detect bleed-through algorithm, a color detection algorithm, a background smoothing algorithm, or a detection of scanned page boundaries algorithm.

8. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the acquisition controller is configured to select the processor control settings based on analysis of the data by the acquisition controller, and to send the processor control settings to the processor.

9. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the acquisition controller is configured to perform an analysis comprising at least one of a page boundary detection, a streak detection, a page border detection, a blank page detection, a conversion from an RGB color representation to a YCbCr color representation, a hue measurement, a saturation measurement, a luminescence measurement, a grayscale intensity histogram, a color histogram, a geometric analysis, color detection, gamma detection for brightness and color levels, and a textual orientation.

10. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the acquisition controller analyzes the data before the data has been processed by the processor.

11. The data processing system of claim 1 further comprising a communication device in communication with the processor, the communication device being operable to send the processed data to a remote user system over a network, and receive a response from the remote user system requesting reprocessing of the processed data using different processor control settings on the one or more data segments and wherein the processor accesses the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

12. The data processing system of claim 1 wherein the data capture device is a scanner.

13. A data processing method comprising:

storing data received from a data capture device in a cache;

obtaining the data from the cache;

performing a first analysis on the data from the cache for determining a set of processor control settings;

transferring the processor control settings to a processor;

processing the data from the random access cache using a processor, the processor processing the data from the random access cache using the processor control settings;

performing a second analysis on the processed data to determine when to use different processor control settings; and

randomly accessing the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

14. The data processing method of claim 13 further comprising repeating the steps of:

analyzing with the analytic engine the cached data to determine when to use different processor control settings; and

accessing the one or more data segments stored in the cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings until the analytic engine determines not to use different processor control settings.

15. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein processing comprises applying at least one image processing algorithm.

16. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein the data capture device is a scanner, a camera, an infrared camera, an acoustic camera, a digital camera, a video recorder, an acoustic sensor, or a facsimile machine.

17. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein the cache stores data and associated metadata.

18. The data processing method of claim 17 wherein the metadata comprises at least one of a tag identifying the data and the location in the cache, a time and date stamp, a sequence number, a beginning of the data segment, an end of the data segment, a height, a width, and a pointer to a next data segment.

19. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein processing comprising applying at least one of a detection orientation algorithm, a detect bleed-through algorithm, a color detection algorithm, a background smoothing algorithm, and a detection of scanned page boundaries algorithm.

20. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein analyzing with the analytic engine comprises performing an analysis comprising at least one of a page boundary detection, a streak detection, a page border detection, a blank page detection, a conversion from an RGB color representation to a YCbCr color representation, a hue measurement, a saturation measurement, a luminescence measurement, a grayscale intensity histogram, a color histogram, a geometric analysis, color detection, gamma detection for brightness and color levels, and a textual orientation.

21. The data processing method of claim 13 wherein the data capture device is a scanner.

22. The data processing method of claim 13 further comprising processing the data from the random access cache, sending the processed data to a remote user system over a network, and receiving a response from the remote user system requesting reprocessing of the processed data using different processor control settings and wherein the processor accesses the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

23. The data processing method of claim 22 wherein the data is first sent to the user system at a lower resolution than the data stored in the random access cache.

24. The data processing method of claim 23 wherein the reprocessed data is sent to the user system at higher resolution than when the data was first sent to the user system.

25. A document processing system comprising:

a random access cache that receives a document from a data capture device, wherein the document is stored as one or more data segments within the random access cache and in a manner that is randomly accessible;

a processor in communication with the random access cache, wherein the processor is configured to obtain the document from the random access cache, the processor having processor control settings that are used to process the document;

a communication device in communication with the processor, the communication device being operable to send the processed document to a remote user system over a network, and receive a response from the remote user system requesting reprocessing of the processed document using different processor control settings on the one or more data segments within the document and wherein the processor accesses the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

26. The document processing system of claim 25 wherein processing comprises applying at least one image processing algorithm.

27. The document processing system of claim 25 wherein processing comprising applying at least one of a detection orientation algorithm, a detect bleed-through algorithm, a color detection algorithm, a background smoothing algorithm, and a detection of scanned page boundaries algorithm.

28. The document processing system of claim 25 further comprising an acquisition controller configured to analyze the data from the random access cache to determine when to use different processor control settings, wherein the acquisition controller is configured to perform an analysis comprising at least one of a page boundary detection, a streak detection, a page boarder detection, a blank page detection, a conversion from an RGB color representation to a YCbCr color representation, a hue measurement, a saturation measurement, a luminescence measurement, a grayscale intensity histogram, a color histogram, a geometric analysis, color detection, gamma detection for brightness and color levels, and a textual orientation.

29. The document processing system of claim 25 wherein the random access cache stores data and associated metadata.

30. The document processing system of claim 29 wherein the metadata comprises at least one of a tag identifying the data and the location in the cache, a time and date stamp, a sequence number, a beginning of the data segment, an end of the data segment, a height, a width, and a pointer to a next data segment.

31. A data processing method comprising:

storing data received from a data capture device as one or more data segments within a random access cache and in a manner that is randomly accessible;

obtaining the data from the random access cache;

processing the data from the random access cache using a processor;

sending the processed document to a remote user system over a network;

receiving a response from the remote user system requesting reprocessing of the processed document using different processor control settings; and

accessing the one or more data segments stored in the random access cache to reprocess the one or more data segments with the different processor control settings.

32. The data processing method of claim 31 wherein the random access cache stores data and associated metadata.

33. The data processing method of claim 31 wherein the metadata comprises at least one of a tag identifying the data and the location in the cache, a time and date stamp, a sequence number, a beginning of the data segment, an end of the data segment, a height, a width, and a pointer to a next data segment.

34. The data processing method of claim 31 wherein processing comprises applying at least one image processing algorithm.

35. The data processing method of claim 31 wherein processing comprising applying at least one of a detection orientation algorithm, a detect bleed-through algorithm, a color detection algorithm, a background smoothing algorithm, and a detection of scanned page boundaries algorithm.

36. The data processing method of claim 31 wherein the acquisition controller performs an analysis comprising at least one of a page boundary detection, a streak detection, a page boarder detection, a blank page detection, a conversion from an RGB color representation to a YCbCr color representation, a hue measurement, a saturation measurement, a luminescence measurement, a grayscale intensity histogram, a color histogram, a geometric analysis, color detection, gamma detection for brightness and color levels, and a textual orientation.