Document Image Processing
| Published date | 01 February 1992 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000001447 |
| Date | 01 February 1992 |
| Pages | 17-20 |
| Author | Simon Perkins |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
DOCUMENT IMAGE PROCESSING
17
M
any companies are making consider-
able savings on staff overheads by
using Document Image Processing
Document
Image
Processing
Simon Perkins
Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 92 No. 2, 1992, pp. 17-20
© MCB University Press Limited, 0263-5577
Introduction and Market Background
When Document Image Processing was first introduced,
it was considered very much the domain of affluent
organizations and more or less an up-market archive
system.
There are now estimated
to
be around
700
known systems
in the UK, and probably many more stand-alone facilities
that have gone unrecorded. More to the point (than just
pure numbers of users) is the fact that Document Image
Processing (DIP) is beginning to be more widely accepted
as the salvation for paper congested companies
in all
walks
of industry and commerce.
Equally revealing is the broader applications
base,
moving
well beyond the purely archival system and into the
interactive and transaction processing needs of busy work
groups.
In a
1989
survey of
11,000
assorted businesses conducted
by
NCC,
eight per cent of
the
respondents said they were
already using DIP either in pilot form, or in a fully
commissioned system. Of the rest, over 20 per cent
reckoned they would be using DIP within the next two
years,
and a further 40 per cent within five years.
With competitive awareness on the increase, and with the
recognition that information management issues will
influence performance, DIP is likely to be the next
technological wave to hit the office environment.
What is DIP?
Just to confuse things, there is a range of acronyms all
purporting to describe essentially the same technology:
• EDMS (Electronic Document Management
Systems)
• CDMS (Compound Document Management
Systems)
• EIIM (Electronic Information and Image Manage-
ment)
• DIP (Document Image Processing — and our
choice)
• OIS (Optical Information Systems).
There are many more besides. The truth of the matter
is that none of these is absolutely correct, and
all
are labels
of convenience depending largely upon the users' interest
and the market sector addressed.
In essence, the technology offers the business user an
alternative to paper-based information. The process
involves scanning a document and saving the digitized
result on
a
storage medium
—
usually an optical
disc,
from
which it may subsequently be retrieved and viewed by
any number of users simultaneously, and without losing
the originally stored image.
The complexity arises once one begins to define what is
meant by "a document", also by what levels of
sophistication one wishes to apply to the scanning process,
and what the user wishes to do with the result.
For example, a document can be regarded as a page of
A4 text, pages from a book or journal, an engineering
drawing, a microfilm or
fiche,
a
record card,
a
photograph,
a line drawing or charts and
graphics.
More important than
document types is the definition of
a
document's logical
structure and layout, for this is how it presents the
information it
contains,
and
allows
the user
to
identify parts
of it for subsequent browsing and retrieval.
Similarly, the scanning process can be limited to a page
image scan (simply a digitized equivalent of the paper
version) — or fully coded text if one employs Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) as part of the capture
process. There are also differing
levels
of facility for those
who need to handle compound documents — i.e.
documents containing a mixture of text, graphics,
photographs, drawings etc., which will support editing
needs.
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