Snowbound Software Intros Color-Detection Technology for Document Processing

By Shamila Janakiraman
TMCnet Contributor

Snowbound Software, specializing in document viewing and conversion solutions, announced the release of a new color-detection technology integrated into the company’s line of document and image file viewing and conversion applications and software development toolkits (SDKs).

Snowbound delivers mail, processes insurance forms and claims, improves banking transactions and securely distributes patient information to healthcare professionals.

Jim Palo, vice president of research and development for Snowbound Software said, “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.”

“Another related use of this technology is the insurance industry which uses Snowbound’s technology to speed the processing of damage claim forms,” Palo added.

According to company sources this functionality is capable of reducing the file size significantly in case of multi-page documents that are mainly text-based but contain some color or gray-scale images. This in turn hastens speed of processing the file and enabling file transfer besides reducing storage space and improving upon collaboration and sharing.

While saving files of this type although only few pages hold color images, the entire document is saved as a color file. This makes the file size bigger and also it is not required to store black and white text pages as color files. This also results in storage space issues and increases the download time to access the files. This is of concern when the download is tried from a mobile device, said officials.

However it is better to keep the text pages as black and white, and to save only the color pages as it is. Snowbound helps in doing this with its intelligent page-by-page processing technology. This technology parses and saves each page individually based upon content in real time.

Officials explained that this feature is enabled by detecting if a page contains color or not. The color-detection technology detects where color images are located, compresses them and saves them with the text pages that are black and white, both in TIFF or other suitable format. Also the TIFF format lets pages to be saved with different compression and bit depths.

Palo further added that, “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.”

The new technology reduces the file size to be up to-60 percent smaller in size besides keeping image conversion and display times to be more by 15 percent. Damage appraisers and others in the field, or office like mortgage and insurance processing professionals will be able to quickly access, display and share business documents with colleagues and clients. This helps them to streamline claims processing and improve the selling process, added officials.