Backscanning from out of the box with THz technology
The laborious and expensive process of backscanning boxes of paper archives could become a point and click operation in the future, via new Terahertz imaging technology that reads pages through closed books with invisible radiation.
Terahertz technology, pioneered by Barmak Heshmat, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, is capable of time-gated spectroscopic imaging that allows for content extraction through layered structures.
Today, that means this technology can read through 9-20 pages of a closed book using Terahertz waves. But for the future, it unlocks the possibility of reading entire boxes of paper without removing the lid.
US startup Ripcord has just appointed Heshmat to its advisory board. It plans to integrate Heshmat’s groundbreaking work in Terahertz imaging technology with Ripcord’s existing OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities and AI powered entity extraction.
Heshmat joins an already stellar roster on the Ripcord advisory board, which includes Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, former NASA CTO, Chris Kemp and Oracle co-founder, Bruce Scott.
Currently, Heshmat serves as the founder and CEO of BRELYON, a stealth startup. His past work has disrupted the world of imaging all the way from fundamentals in design of optics to introduction to new applications such as batch scanning.
“I’m honoured to join Ripcord’s advisory board to help leverage lessons learned in THz imaging and time-of-flight imaging that can help Ripcord radically accelerate data capture from paper documents,” said Barmak Heshmat, founder and CEO of BRELYON.
“Ripcord is an innovative and forward-thinking company that combines data that we can uncover through cutting-edge non-optical imaging with machine learning and artificial intelligence to produce insights that previously could not have been imagined. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities this creates as we transition from physical to digital.”
“Barmak’s help in commercializing this approach will make Ripcord’s mission of taking the entire world paperless a reality,” said Alex Fielding, founder and iCEO, Ripcord.
“It’s not every day that you meet a person as brilliant and curious as Barmak, much less have the opportunity to learn from him and work alongside him to commercialize and scale a technology approach that can help us create a paperless future. This advancement in imaging is the technological equivalent of going from an X-Ray to a high-resolution MRI.”
Co-founded by former Apple and NASA employees, Ripcord enables companies to digitize paper records and connect those records to existing enterprise systems. The company says it provides an alternative to outdated records management systems that are overly complex, require expensive customization and take years to effectively implement.