New software tools to enable your scanner to edit your scanned documents and improve image quality at the point of capture have been introduced by Visioneer.

Visioneer Acuity is a collection of advanced document imaging enhancement tools that allow both manual and automatic editing of scanned documents and improvement of visual quality.

Using sophisticated algorithms, Acuity can detect the colour and size of pages, remove blanks and rotate images based on content. It also automatically cleans up black and white output using dynamic threshold and de-speckling, or manually with normal threshold techniques by dropping unnecessary colours, or selecting methods more suited to particular document types resulting in improved OCR accuracy or reproduction of image content. This ultimately results in less time spent manually correcting results after capture.

“The technology behind Acuity is complex, but thanks to integration with our OneTouch, TWAIN and WIA drivers using DriverPLUS results can be achieved with the touch of a button,” said Jon Harju, CTO at Visioneer.

“Take a random stack of pages from your desk. Unless they came directly from a laser printer, they probably have a few marks on them, highlighted notes, stamps, wrinkles or smudges, and even a page or two upside down. Turn on all the automatic settings and Acuity adjusts every image while scanning to a crisp and clear result.”

Faxes, shipping forms, brochures, spreadsheets, business cards, hand written notes, letter head and coloured paper are just a few examples of documents that can be difficult for a scanner to copy.

Visioneer Acuity allows users to scan with confidence by intelligently modifying every page after being scanned to a crisp and clean image. Resulting files are easily read by the human eye and more clearly recognided by optical character recognition software for converting to text. Optionally capture multiple copies that can be used later.

This is a vast improvement over the highly inefficient process of separating these documents into batches of similar types or re-stacking and adjusting the results after scanning in order to get the required results.

Visioneer Acuity advanced features include:
Enhancing what is captured by the scanner
Capture mixed sized pages using the automatic cropping and deskew features
Automatically rotate images based on content so they are always right side up
Automatically detect and remove blank pages
Choose to capture only the back sides of pages in a document
Choose different settings for different sides of the pages in a document
Choose different settings for different document sources found on the scanner, Example: Card feeder, Flatbed or ADF
Adjusting scan settings for optimal results
Capture color, gray and/or black and white copies of documents in a single pass using multi-stream
Capture single color and black and white or gray images from documents with mixed content using automatic color detection
Remove custom colors using the advanced color dropout
Invert and/or mirror images
Capture details in photographs with error diffusion or halftones
Improving visual clarity of saved images and files
Remove noise from the edges of images using edge cleanup
Sharpen, blur or unsharpen images
Remove noise using de-speckle
Automatically enhance content in documents with complex backgrounds using dynamic threshold

As a standard software protocol and applications programming interface, TWAIN drivers control the communication between a software application and your scanner and serve as the primary user interface to the scanner from within applications.

Acuity will be released for currently shipping Visioneer and Xerox DocuMate scanners in a staged release that will continue throughout 2012. Users can download Visioneer Acuity from the Visioneer website (system requirements verification required).