Kofax Adds Advanced Clarity Feature To Its Award-Winning VirtualReScan Technology (VRS)
Kofax, the world's largest information capture vendor, today announced a new version of its award-winning VRS technology. With VRS 4.1 Professional, the superior image quality that is a VRS hallmark is taken to the next level with the Advanced Clarity feature that produces improved image quality on documents that were once considered unscannable.
VRS, a de facto standard for scanning productivity, enables high accuracy in data captured from scanned documents, significantly reducing the need to manually correct the results of intelligent character recognition (ICR) and optical character recognition (OCR). As documents pass through a scanner, VRS performs a multi-point inspection of each image. Any inconsistencies are immediately corrected by VRS so that only the straightest, most readable images are processed.
VRS 4.1 Professional extends the capabilities introduced with VRS 4.0 Plus, which not only further minimized document preparation time, but also tapped into the widely under-utilized color capabilities of nearly all scanners by offering intelligent color detection and color saturation features. Not only are all the features of VRS 4.0 Plus included in VRS 4.1 Professional, but the new Advanced Clarity feature is now available to combat the most challenging documents. Advanced Clarity offers more image quality options and the ability to process documents that were once considered impossible to process due to noisy backgrounds. This feature allows users to maximize scanning time and process more images without human intervention.
"With the introduction of VRS 4.1 Professional, Kofax continues to extend our customers' ability to create high-quality results from even the most difficult documents," said Anthony Macciola, vice president of product management at Kofax. "VRS 4.1 Professional further reduces costly rescanning and document preparation, and the new Advanced Clarity feature enables organizations to get perfectly adjusted images and valuable data from virtually every document, no matter how compromised the source."
The superior capabilities of VRS have caused the technology to be named a de facto standard in the high-speed scanner market by IDC, the world's leading technology research company. According to a new market analysis entitled "U.S. Scanning Solutions 2005-2009 Forecast," IDC noted that "By incorporating Kofax's VirtualReScan, a de facto standard in the high-speed scanner market, vendors assure users that they are provided with the best image available."
"Integration of VRS with scanners dramatically improves image quality and increases overall efficiency of the scanning process for the document management applications," IDC said in its study. "The VRS autoexposure feature automatically optimizes the scanned image, regardless of original document quality. VRS autocropping and wide-angle, de-skew features allow mixed batches of documents to be scanned perfectly, without the need of rescanning. Image inconsistencies such as alignment, brightness and contrast are eliminated by VRS, providing the best-quality, most readable scanned images to the user, eliminating scanning inefficiencies."
Through 2007, Kofax expects to distribute 200,000 licenses of VRS software bundled with desktop and workgroup scanners from Böwe Bell + Howell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Visioneer/Xerox. Kofax offers the advanced features of VRS 4.1 Professional as an upgrade to these installations.
Since its introduction in 1998, Kofax VRS technology has been a key component of more than 70,000 installations, making it one of the most widely adopted and recognized scanning technologies in the industry. Every major manufacturer of production scanners has released VRS-certified scanners, including Böwe Bell + Howell, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Panasonic, Ricoh, Visioneer and Xerox.
About Kofax
Kofax, a division of DICOM Group plc (LSE: DCM.L), is the world's leading provider of information capture software, according to research by Harvey Spencer Associates. Kofax products enable the automation of business processes by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents from throughout organizations, transforming them into retrievable information, and delivering it all into line-of-business applications, databases and archives. The company's Ascent platform is the most popular information capture application worldwide, and its VRS (VirtualReScan) is the de facto standard for scanning productivity. Kofax products are widely used in finance, government, insurance, healthcare, and a broad range of companies and agencies that must capture critical business information from paper and electronic documents and forms.