February 25, 2002—IDEAL, a producer of color and monochrome scanning solutions for large format drawings and technical documents, has launched RasterID, an intelligent title block contents recognition software with built-in, breakthrough optical character recognition (OCR) technology. RasterID solves the bottleneck problem of indexing large numbers of drawings during and after the scanning process. It is targeted to the AEC (Architect, Engineering, Construction), CAD, Manufacturing, GIS (geographic information systems), and Reprographics industries.
RasterID automatically extracts title block information from scanned drawings to an archiving database such as Microsoft Access, or to Excel spreadsheets or comma delimited text. Scanned drawings are indexed by information contained in the drawing’s title block. For instance, a drawing can be indexed by project, designer, date of drawing, etc. In addition, the user can customize or define the fields. Since indexing is automatic, the user only needs to view and check the results for quality-control purposes.
Cleanup and editing tools including deskewing, despeckling, rotating, and mirroring. In addition, RasterID has built-in OCR with character training capability for those hard-to-read letters and numbers. It supports all IDEAL/Contex large format scanners and any scanners supported by TWAIN. The monochrome file formats supported include TIFF, BMP, RLC, CALS Raster, C4, and TG4.
Third-party developers will get a full set of tools to integrate RasterID technology to their application. A developer’s license includes full source VisualBasic code of the application. All features of RasterID are available for customization.
RasterID is compatible with IDEAL’s IntraNETIX, browser-based document management software. Archive existing paper drawings and CAD files for easy retrieval to your company’s intranet or to the Internet. Index and view existing paper drawings and CAD files using a standard browser.
For more information, contact IDEAL at 301/468-0123.
