Passing a Custom Parameter with the
Black Ice Printer Drivers
The
Black Ice printer driver can launch an application
before or after printing. When the application is
launched after printing, the driver can pass several
command line parameters to the application. The 3rd
party application can parse the command line and
process the information passed in the command line
parameters. Until now the following available
command line parameters were:
As a
new option in addition to the existing parameters
now it is possible to pass a custom parameter. The
parameter is ‘custom’ because it can contain any
value or string, up to 260 characters in length.
The
order in which the parameter will be passed to the
application can be changed.
Also, if some parameters are not necessary, checking
the
Remove Parameters
option can disable them.
The
value of the custom parameter can be set manually
through the user interface, programmatically through
the BlackIceDEVMODE.OCX and BlackIceDEVMODE.DLL
controls or at install time using the INI file
(I.e.: BiCIiniNT.ini in the case or the Black Ice
Color Printer Driver).
The
custom parameter option creates great flexibility
for developers who may need to process the output
images based on different criteria. For example,
passing the name of the department which generated
the images will enable the application to process
the images differently from one department to
another.
Document Imaging SDK Image
Processing
Filtering a noisy scanned hand written image
The original image
The original image is a scanned, hand written image with a strong
additive noise due to the scanning process and the poor quality of
the original paper. Images such as the one used in this example can
be filtered in order to remove the noise from it.
It is
important to note that simple filtering alone cannot create wonders,
and it’s also important to bear in mind that none of the filtering
methods are able to make a new image containing more information
than the original. After filtering we always lose some information,
but if the filtering is chosen well then the information that we
need stays on the image, and we lose the noise. A filtering method
is only able to create a new image where the information important
to us appears stronger than before the filtering.
One of the best filters (in these
special cases like this example) for removing additive, salt and
pepper noise is a very simple filtering method called the Median
filter.
Median filtered image with 2x2 sized matrix
Using the Median filter, the additive
salt and pepper noise is removed, but we also lost some information
from the handwriting itself. In this case a 2x2 sized matrix was
used for the Median filtering due to the small size of the noise
regions. The larger the matrix size, the more noise is removed, but
also more information is lost from the important parts of the image.
So the best solution is to find a middle ground that removes the
most noise while preserving the most image integrity.
In the next step, the errors in the hand
writing generated by the Median filter should be fixed. This image
contains only black and white pixels. There are many excelent
filtering methods for these binary images as they are called, but
unfortunately the original images are not always binary. So the
image should be binarized now.
Binarized image with Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion dithering
For binarization, the Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion dithering
method was used. On the already binarized image the holes in the
hand writing due to the Median filter could be filled up with a
binary Dilation filter. Dilation filter makes the lines stronger,
fills up the small holes and make the lines continuous. In this
example a 3x3 sized full one matrix was used for dilation.
The final filtered image after dilation
(above) and the original image (below)
The
Black Ice Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX includes many
powerful filters and effects to perform a wide range
of image correction and processing, including the
functionality listed in the above article.