Deskew/Autodeskew: What’s That?

Hi folks,

This week we thought about offering to our general public some explanations about deskew/autodeskew, mainly to answer two questions: what’s that and why is it important to have?

Skew is an artifact that might appear during document scanning process and it consists of getting the document’s text/images be rotated at a slight angle.
It can have various causes but the most common are paper getting misplaced during a scan.
Therefore, deskew is the process of detecting and fixing this issue on scanned files (ie, bitmap) so deskewed images will have the text/images correctly and horizontally aligned.

And why is this important?
Well, a first benefit will be that you don’t have to scan in again the skewed documents.
Instead of the mechanical and time-consuming actions that re-scan involves, everything is done automatically and efficiently by the software providing deskew feature.

But there is yet another important benefit of deskewing: for those who need to OCR the scanned documents, deskew is an important correction to do before submitting to OCR process.
Deskew increases the rate of character recognition accuracy because aligned text is much closer to what the OCR software is supposed to encounter when performing image analysis.

All our products, SDKs (GdPicture.NET) and general public products (PaperScan and PaperLight BETA) provide the autodeskew feature as it is a must-have for any professional document imaging software.

Cheers,

Bogdan