Cannon Scanners: The Ways You Can Use and Help

Most microfilm scanners try to produce images on the fly as the film passes through the machine. This leaves the scanner only one opportunity to detect the views (process in which the machine identifies individual views on a section of the film and segments them into separate image files) and to perform other necessary intensive tasks such as straightening, cropping, sharpening, etc. If there is a change in the film density (difference between the lightest and darkest images), an image may be cut in half due to a misfire in the view detection process, or even be entirely missed.

To be able to remedy this type of error, it is necessary to be able to identify a missed view (which is not an easy task with a reel comprising thousands of images), to locate it physically on the reel (even less easy task), re-digitize it correctly and then insert / replace it manually in the original batch of images. It is a very time consuming and expensive process, which is why most providers do not offer it. As far as the Digitization Services are concerned, this is important.

The Capturing of the Microfilms

By capturing each microfilm reel in 'continuous tape', that is to say by including all the empty spaces between the views on the film as well as the views themselves, we can perform a detection of the views as often as necessary , and thus perfectly capture each view present on the reel. View frames can even be redrawn by the operator, just by dragging them with a mouse.

Quality control and image enhancement

Their operators spend the majority of their time checking the quality and adapting the images before they are produced (not after), in order to avoid any corrections being made to the final images. We check the quality of each image and, if there is a need to make corrections, they are made immediately. A final quality control confirms that all of the above steps have been completed correctly. In addition, their SRP system has on-board quality control functions, like all scanners used. Their Quality Supervisor is automatically notified by the SRP system in the event of a quality problem.

Last Words

We also apply automatic and manual image enhancement functions: automatic white balance, manual or automatic image rotation, cropping / cropping (e.g. removing black edges), automatic framing, splitting of 2 adjacent images out of 2 pages, automatic straightening to eliminate the tilting of an image which prevents it from being perfectly framed on the page or screen, conservation / deletion of backer boards or blip counter digits, etc. Important detail, the SRP image enhancement module uses a 16-core server dedicated exclusively to image processing after scanning, and performs a series of complex algorithmic image enhancement functions.