Why image enhancement is so crucial in scope of Intelligent Document Processing?
If you are just about to start your IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) Project or you are seeking for the solution designed to capture data from the scanned documents (images) – it is a right time for you to look closer at image enhancement automated capability. It is better not to ignore this powerful automated feature in your IDP project if your ultimate goal is to achieve the best possible accuracy rate of the captured data.
What is image enhancement?
Image enhancement or sometimes we may call it document enhancement (document normalization) or image improvement is all about advanced automated techniques which help to make the original image better in terms of quality.
What image enhancement is designed to do?
In different integrated solutions - this feature “image enhancement” may perform different type of image improvement operations. But in general, it shall be capable to do the following:
- Image (document) rotation;
- Image (document) scaling;
- Whitening & normalizing the image (document) background;
- Removing or reducing unnecessary noise & artefacts from the image (document);
- Image (document) cropping;
- Image (document) enhancing contrast;
- Lines straightening on the image (document);
- Image (document) geometric correction;
- Image (document) skew detection and correction;
- Thickening or blackening the characters on the image (document);
- Removing lines from the image (document);
- Smoothing objects on the image (document);
- etc.
Why image enhancement is so crucial in scope of Intelligent Document Processing?
As you may agree, the scanned documents may come to the processing in different quality and may not always be ideally scanned or photographed. The scanned images could be of different scale, not properly rotated, too bright or too dark, smudged or discolored, folded, have margins that are too large or too small, etc. And if you try to OCR such images straight away without image enhancement – you will get relatively low accuracy rate of the captured and recognized data from your images and ultimately your straight-through processing rate will be respectively also low as many image (documents) will require to involve human (business user) to validate the captured data.
How image enhancement works in practice?
Image enhancement is quite comprehensive and very intelligent operation performed by the machine leveraging advanced algorithms including Computer Vision technology. If all is well designed - image enhancement is fully automated operation which is not visible for human eyes as all is performed on the background for seconds. The business users may only see the visual difference: Original Image vs Enhanced. It is always better to see all in action:
Conclusion
Image enhancement is one of the crucial automated capability in scope of Intelligent Document Processing which has direct impact on your data accuracy rate. The better quality of image you are able to achieve with image enhancement capability - the greater results you will get out of image (document) processing. Intelligent Automation is all about using intelligent techniques for image (document) processing and one of them - image enhancement.
More good and quick read: Intelligent Document Processing leveraging Tesseract, Google Vision API and elDoc: OCR solutions comparison analysis
Willing to watch more use cases on image enhancement - follow the link: image enhancement in elDoc
About «elDoc»
«elDoc» - Integrated Intelligent Automated Platform for Document Understanding, Document Workflow Automation and Content Management from Anywhere. «elDoc» is enterprise level solution available as SaaS and on-prem for end-to-end Intelligent Document Processing. elDoc is powered with cognitive technologies (Artificial Intelligence including Computer Vision) to be capable to process intelligently documents (scanned and digitally generated) of any complexity with further end-to-end document processing and document workflow automation.
About «DMS Solutions»
DMS Solutions» is a technology company, a professional service provider delivering Intelligent Automation Solutions and is an authorized implementation partner of “elDoc” - Integrated Automated Platform for Intelligent Document Processing, Document Workflow Automation and File Management.
We leverage Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence to build a powerful digital workforce for your business to win on the market. We focus on exploring new ways to apply disruptive technologies and recent inventions to bring innovative automation solutions in. We break boundaries and help clients to achieve their strategic goals through delivering next-generation solutions.
Our Clients are high-performing enterprises coming from different industries: banking & financial services, insurance, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing & retail, government, real estate, transportation, oil & gas, energy, etc. We operate globally having HQ in Hong Kong.