Snowbound Software, the market leader in document viewing and conversion solutions, is pleased to announce new color-detection technology integrated into the company’s line of document and image file viewing and conversion applications and software development toolkits (SDKs). This innovative functionality enables dramatic file size reduction in multi-page documents that are mainly text-based but contain some color or gray-scale images – speeding processing and file transfer, decreasing storage space and enhancing collaboration and sharing.

“Many of our customers have multi-page documents comprised of mostly black and white text pages with some images (photos, drawings, diagrams) dispersed throughout. One example of this is real estate appraisal forms containing photos of the property listed,” explained Jim Palo, vice president of research and development for Snowbound Software. “Another related use of this technology is the insurance industry which uses Snowbound’s technology to speed the processing of damage claim forms.”

A very common issue that occurs when saving files of this type is that even though only a few pages actually contain color images, the entire document is saved as a color file. However it isn’t necessary, or desirable, to save the black and white text pages as color files as this makes the files much larger and therefore challenges storage space resources and download time to access – especially on today’s smaller mobile devices.

A much better solution is to keep the text pages as black and white, and to save only the color pages as such. Snowbound accomplishes this through intelligent page-by-page processing technology – parsing and saving each page individually based upon content – all in real time. Technically this is accomplished first by detecting if a page contains color or not. Through this innovative color-detection technology, color images are located, compressed and saved alongside the text pages that are black and white, both in TIFF or other suitable format. (The TIFF format allows for each page to be saved with different compression and bit depths.)

“Reviewing scanned documents rather than paper documents speeds processing time by at least a factor of two, security is increased because there is no paper to be misplaced or copied, archiving is much simpler because it’s all electronic, and, in the banking sector in particular, costs can be reduced by establishing dispersed processing centers in less expensive areas. Plus, anyone with authorization can access needed documents, wherever they might be,” added Palo.

The resulting files produced by this process can be up to-60% smaller in size with the added benefit of conversion and display times of up to 15% faster. Now, damage appraisers and others in the field, or office for that matter, such as mortgage and insurance processing professionals, can quickly access, display and share business documents with colleagues and clients to streamline claims processing, as well as enhance the selling process.
 
Pricing and Availability

Snowbound’s Color-detection Technology is available in the firm’s line of RasterMaster viewing and conversion SDKs, as well as its VirtualViewer family of document and image viewers. Contact us at [email protected] or 617-607-2010 for more pricing information and more details.