I.R.I.S., a leader in the "Document to Knowledge" market, provides solutions for the conversion of paper documents into electronic formats, for archiving, storing, managing and sharing of digital information. I.R.I.S. develops and sells a full range of fast, easy-to-use OCR (optical character recognition) products for both Windows and MacOS which convert paper-based information into editable data.
WinDriver in I.R.I.S.'s Commercially Available IRISPen Scanner
The IRISPen is a device that enables instant scanning and entering of texts, figures, barcodes and hand-written numbers into any application, right at the cursor position. For the IRISPen II - a pen scanner, I.R.I.S. engineers were required to develop a USB driver for the Windows NT 4.0 OS on which the pen's host OS runs. I.R.I.S. engineers wanted to avoid the process involved in in-house driver development. Cost and time to market were important considerations in their search for a stable host driver for their USB device running Windows NT.
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Screen Shot of IRISPen Control Panel
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Why USB?
In 1990, during the pre-USB era, I.R.I.S. developed the first version of the IRISPen (IRISPen I) with a bi-directional parallel interface. In order to limit the data throughput available on the parallel port, only a black/white image was scanned (1 bit per pixel). The parallel port had several limitations, especially conflicts with existing printer drivers already present on the user's machine. To avoid these limitations, I.R.I.S. planned that the next version of the scanner (IRISPen II) would have an USB interface. Due to higher bandwidth available on USB, the IRISPen scanner scans in grey level mode (8 bits per pixel).
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Initially IRISPen II USB supported Win98, WinME, Win2K and XP operating systems. I.R.I.S. selected Jungo WinDriver as the solution to interface the WinDriver USB stack for Windows NT, an OS that does not natively support USB. WinDriver USB for NT provided a host stack and thereby a means to communicate directly with the IRISPen USB hardware. As IRISPen's USB communication mode is very simple (only control and bulk transfers are implemented), I.R.I.S. ideally wanted to use an existing commercial driver stack, and not a tool to build a complex USB driver from scratch. "The Jungo USB stack provides exactly what IRIS engineers were looking for: API interfaces, that can be called directly from the front end application developed in C/C++, to send and receive data to/from the USB port (used by the IRISPen device.)," said Patrick Verleysen, Product Manager at I.R.I.S.
WinDriver's cross platform portability will enable I.R.I.S. to port the driver to Windows Win98, WinME, Min2K and XP in the future, enabling them to maintain one set of code and in effect, one driver for all supported operating systems.
The IRISPen addresses several target markets. For consumer and business users, the IRISPen allows scanning and entering of texts, figures, barcodes and hand-written numbers instantly into your Windows application. The IRISPen is quicker than manual retyping therefore being useful for word processing, database, contact management and spreadsheet applications.
The IRISPen II, a USB device, is a true 32 bit application designed for Windows ME/2000/98/XP.
System Requirements:
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A Pentium based PC with 32 MB RAM
- 50 MB free disk space
- Win 98/2000/ME/XP operating system
- CD-ROM drive
- Free USB port
The Scanner's Inner Workings…
When the user presses and moves the scanner over paper, the pen transmits the raw data image through the USB channel to the PC. On Windows, a process captures the bitmap , reconstructs the image, and as soon as the user lifts the scanner off the page, an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process analyses the image, and transforms the image to a character string. This string is then sent through the standard keyboard driver to the application that currently has the focus. The advantage of this method is that it is compatible with all the applications that run on Windows, as the application "sees" the characters as if they had been typed on the keyboard.
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| Global Architecture of IRISPen Solution, that Includes Jungo's WinDriver |
More about I.R.I.S.
I.R.I.S. also provides a range of IT services and solutions covering a wide range of fields from the dematerialization of documents to the management of knowledge (KM), including Automatic Document Reading, Electronic Document Management, information sharing, workflow, and data storage and archiving.
To get more information, please visit I.R.I.S.' website at: www.irislink.com, or contact I.R.I.S. at info@irislink.com
Full description of the IRISPen product, including an IRISPen demo movie: www.irislink.com/opt/uk/products/irispen/index.html
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