[sane-devel] Kofax CGA Board

[luja]

Dear List,

good scanners are heavy, so everything lighter than 20kG is nor worth using :-)
So I am experimenting with old ex-expensive production scanners that process at least 80 image per minute. Such as fujitsu fi-5900c or kodak i810 (the dinosaur).
As the fi-5900c is quite small you can have it in your room not in a storage house. If you connect it using usb you find it beeing slowed down by slow usb.
Also the native scsi interface is nice but KOFAX CGA is nicer.
Here is a very expensive offer at ebay for reference. Hint, the interface comes with the scanner, as it was purchased at that time with the priceless scanner for a "priceless" price :-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20221230094606/https://www.ebay.com/itm/183424759527

Please look at the picture of that ebay offer:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221230094608/https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Om8AAOSwd6pblVeN/s-l1600.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20221230095152/https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/StgAAOSw01JblVeQ/s-l1600.jpg

So you can see SDRAM module, a freescale coldfire CPU (68K+, maybe running some sort of RTOS), and 2 xilinx spartan fpa, which was quit good at that time.

KOFAX VRS 4.5 was shipped with fujitsu scanners and there is a copy at archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/vrs-4.50.7z
Also the newer KOFAX VRS 5.1.0 is shipped for them, you can find it on the KOFAX page.

So why I am posting this?

There are also other production scanners which use the KOFAX interface and software companies tend to be "lazy", so the VRS SCSI and VRS USB should (!) be similar for all KOFAX CGM interfaces.
The KOFAX VRS tool provides some "advanced" image processing features like descewing, noise removal, gamma correction and so on and offloads some of it to the CGM board which sits in the scaner.

So I suggest to use KOFAX VRS, there is also an unlimited trial version that stamps the images, with a virtualization environment and to sniff the SCSI /dev/sg0 traffic or the USB traffic using the Linux that runs the Windows Vista-VM :-) with KOFAX.
https://www.kofax.com/products/vrs-elite/trial
after entering some credentials you get this link.
https://az32125.vo.msecnd.net/download/Download$/VRS/KofaxVRS-5.2.0.ZIP
also archive.org has it :-)

Depending on the findings we could use ALL Kodak CGA based production scanners with sane and use some CGA features like noise reduction or deskewing.

As I found by reading manuals, the VRS tool gets always greyscale or color imaes from the CGA interface and does the halftone stuff in their software running with windows.

I would like to opt to use some of the most interesting features of the CGA board to quickly extract the pictures from the scanners, as we have modern computers today and tons of open source image processing like unpaper that we do not need the VRS tool.

We need to talk to the interface, and to learn how it works.

Who wants to join the efforts?

cheers

luja


 
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