Guido,
In theory this is the case, that greyscale shouldn't make a difference
but I have wondered about it. When I change my brightness settings,
I get skewed results, i.e. different ocr errors and recognition
settings. Go figure. Why 400 DPI for books with regular
print? Does this seem to increase accuracy at times? Also,
aren't there times in a book where static or dynamic versus greyscale
would be better. I've scanned several books where this seems to be
the case, maybe because of background noise on the page or
somethingg.
Ner
At 03:02 PM 4/29/2004, you wrote:
Paul, I also use grayscale at 400 DPI most of the time with Kurzweil 8.0. If you find it is rather slow, scan images only, then turn on pure recognition before going to sleep. Your book will be ready when you wake in the morning, no matter how large it is. By the way, with grayscale brightness makes no difference.
Guido
Guido D. Corona
IBM Accessibility Center, Austin Tx.
IBM Research,
Phone: (512) 838-9735
Email: guidoc@xxxxxxxxxxx
Visit my weekly Accessibility WebLog at:
http://www-3.ibm.com/able/weblog/corona_weblog.html
"Edwards, Paul" <pedwards@xxxxxxxx>
Sent by: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
04/29/2004 02:42 PM
Please respond to
bksvol-discuss
To<bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
cc[bksvol-discuss] Re: text quality
Subject
This is a difficult issue. I take the approach of carefully checking the first few pages at the beginning of a scan. If there are errors I can adjust for, I do that. I also rescan pages whose value in Kurzweil comes back lower than ninety. I do not tend to scan ninety to ninety-five because I can usually not make much of a difference and we are often dealing with a screwed over heading or something.
However, I scanned a book recently which was a hard cover and which should have scanned like a dream and came out as pure druck.
I have found that optimizing scanning is, for the most part, worth doing. The results do not always make me happy in that I am now scanning a book using gray scale and sixty which takes forever to scan. By the way, it is legends two edited by Robert Silverberg.
Paul
Paul Edwards, Director
Access Services, North Campus
Phone: (305) 237-1146
Fax: (305-237-1831
TTY: (305) 237-1413
Email: pedwards@xxxxxxxx
home email: edwpaul@xxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: Kellie Hartmann [mailto:kellhart@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 1:04 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] text quality
Hi all.
Even with the wonderful new scanning software available there are a few
kinds of things that are very difficult to get a good scan from. For
example, linguistics books are often very graphical in nature and contain
symbols that the OCR packages don't recognize; things like r-underring and
turned V etc. Also some cheap paperbacks do have places where they seem to
be blurred. I scanned a novel that I was assigned to read in French class,
and when I found illegible passages I tried rescanning them. I rescanned
several times changing various settings, but certain passages absolutely
refused to scan. I don't really plan to submit it to Bookshare anyway, but I
would prefer this scan, with a couple of blurred lines every 20 pages or so,
to no scan. I'm able to use this in class with no problems, so in my opinion
this is far better than nothing. Finally, I have another French book which
has very glossy pages and lots of flashy graphical design. Again, even with
a lot of work on experimenting with different settings my results were not
encouraging. This I definitely won't submit to Bookshare because I can't get
it in good enough shape; the effort required would be far beyond the
benefits. I agree that careless scanning is unreasonable, and think that
validating is important. It always takes me much longer to validate
something than to scan it because I read the whole book and fix every error
that can possibly be fixed. Not every validator is going to do that, and
certain books, such as enormous textbooks, really would require a great
investment in time to proof thoroughly. So it isn't realistic to expect
every book to be flawless. What I would really like eventually, and I know
this isn't realistic either, would be to have all the fair-quality books
rescanned.
Kellie
Noel Romey
Arkansas, USA
View my insights at my
live journal: http://djner.livejournal.com
