Method and module system for high speed processing of item images

摘要

A system and method for processing image data from a document and for producing a compressed binarized version of the image data for transmission to or use by subsequent users. Processing of the image data is done in parallel after the scanning of the document is started but before the entire document is scanned. A splitter is used to divide a scan line of image data produced by an imager at the scan line into a plurality of channels, with each channel having at least one overlap area of pixels and with the overlap areas of pixels being used to avoid errors between channels. Thresholding and compression are performed by each one of the channels in parallel. The compression is performed in a direction which is perpendicular to the direction of scanning and conforms to a standard compression algorithm like CCITT Group 4.