Over the last 12 years, LuraTech has proven itself a thought leader in applying complex mathematical algorithms to "real world" digital imagery and e-document applications. With this expertise, we continue to develop highly reliable software products delivered with excellence in service and support.

Therefore, we are pleased to announce an entirely new imaging software product: The LuraWave JP2 Image Content Server (ICS), v1.04. ICS allows organizations to deliver JPEG2000 images, document collections and their respective metadata through customizable, browser-based viewing applications without any plug-ins, ActiveX components or additional viewing software. After a rigorous two years of development and six months of beta-testing at several large, well-known organizations such as the Library and Archives of Canada and Missouri Botanical Gardens, it is now officially released. Any enterprise that wants to take full advantage JPEG2000 as their primary image store and create advanced web-based viewing applications should consider LuraWave ICS.

Beyond JPEG2000, LuraTech has also expanded its role in providing and promoting PDF/A, the new ISO compliant file format for long term archival of electronic documents. Early last summer, LuraTech announced the release of the LuraDocument PDF Compressor with PDF/A output, the first software on the market to convert scanned documents into the PDF/A format. Then LuraTech initiated the establishment the PDF/A Competence Center (http://www.pdfa.org/en), an educational consortium of several key technology vendors. Since then, many European organizations have quickly adopted the PDF/A standard. And even now, several North American organizations such as the National Archives and Records Administration, the Secretary of the State in California, and Ministry of Health of Canada are now looking into the format. In early November, the City of Toronto adopted the new standard with their purchase of the PDF Compressor Server, and we expect to see major interest in this standard throughout the Americas.

Please continue to read to learn more about LuraTech's Image Content Server and PDF/A implementation!

We are pleased to introduce the LuraWave JP2 Image Content Server (ICS), Version 1.04.

What is ICS?

ICS is a software tool kit that allows your organization to develop advanced customizable, browser-based viewing applications on top of your JPEG2000 image stores without requiring end users to download and install any additional ActiveX components or viewing software.

How does ICS Work?

ICS converts JPEG2000 images to JPEG and delivers them "on-the-fly" to your browser-based viewing application. Since ICS uses JPEG as its primary delivery format and standard JavaScript components, your organization can create advanced image viewing features, such as panning, zooming and page turning within your own browser-based viewing application without forcing end users to install additional software.

Moreover, since the JPEG's are created "on-the-fly" from one source JPEG2000 image, ICS eliminates the need to create multiple derivative files, thus reducing your overall administration costs. This is done by taking advantage of the multi-layer compression capability of JPEG2000. ICS takes only the resolution layers that are needed to render a specific image request. For example, if the end user's client requests a thumbnail, then only a small portion of the JPEG2000 image is converted to JPEG and delivered. However, if the end user wishes to see a high-resolution version of the image to zoom in on, then the ICS converts more high-resolution layers of the image for delivery.

Who can use ICS?

If your organization wants to store and deliver high-resolution, digitized image content and its metadata over the web, then ICS is great solution for you. This new ability to design a rich end-user viewing experience is invaluable for any organization that posts online digital versions of books, artwork, manuscripts, maps, geospatial photographs, or medical content. It offers an incredibly low-storage, low-bandwidth solution for the delivery digital images while shortening application development time and lowering administration costs.

For more information on the LuraWave JP2 Image Content Server, please click here: http://www.luratech.com/products/lurawave/jp2/ics/, or contact Mark McKinney at m.mckinney@luratech.com.

• Fast conversion of 2 million critical documents into high-resolution PDFs using ISO standard PDF/A
• Superior compression using sophisticated Mixed Raster Content (MRC), multi-layer segmentation for compression ratios of 300:1
• Creation of highly accurate, full-text searchable documents with the fully integrated ABBYY OCR engine
• Implementation of custom watermark to secure documents

Securitas, one of the leading private security companies in the world, used LuraDocument PDF Compressor to effectively compress over 14,000 personnel files, reduce storage needs, add a custom watermark on each for added security, and make them accessible to its 70 offices.

In early 2005, the company digitized all of its personnel files over four months, using an external scanning service to process 2 million pages (160,000 PDF files) with Kodak scanners and Kodak Capture software. According to Michael Kramss, product manager and procurer for Securitas, problems followed immediately. "Since the documents were black and white, grayscale and color, we suddenly had gargantuan-sized data. Sending these large files between offices resulted in clogging the network and made viewing the documents unacceptably slow." Moreover, the PDF documents that were coming out of the process were not full-text readable and included no embedded mechanism to insure for document integrity and security.

LuraDocument PDF Compressor converted the original PDFs into highly compressed, full-text searchable PDFs, using the PDF/A open standard. LuraTech's segmentation technology separated text and image sections of the page into three distinctive layers and compressed each layer separately with the best possible algorithm, resulting in compression ratios of 300:1. Moreover, the documents have been made "future-proof" by saving them in the long-term archival format, PDF/A. By using the new ISO standard, Securitas has guaranteed the ability to open and read the documents in the foreseeable future.

In other words, the documents were reduced to extremely small files without any sacrifice of text and image quality. Since they are readable in Acrobat readers (5.0 and higher), the compressed files can be easily shared over the Internet, with very fast download times. And due to confidential and important detail of each document, the new PDF's are now secured with a unique Securitas watermark to avoid any mishandling of the information.

"LuraDocument PDF Compressor runs very well and provides a stable real world implementation. The integrated ABBYY OCR engine is invaluable, delivering highly accurate scans. LuraTech was very flexible and understanding of our requirements. We were very pleased with LuraTech's collaboration," summed up Kramss.

Based upon its work with LuraTech on this project, Securitas is now planning further implementation of LuraDocument products and to intensify the partnership with LuraTech.

• Dramatic savings in bandwidth and long-term storage
• Hardware savings of over $96,600 over three years
• Superior file compression: files reduced by 90% (400 K to 40K)
• Fundamental improvement to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system architecture

When Check into Cash, a payday advance service operating 1200+ offices throughout the USA, used the LuraDocument PDF Compressor SDK, it reduced the size of its files by 90% with no loss in quality, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in bandwidth and storage needs. This was a critical achievement for a company whose individual offices back up 10 MB (30-40 two-page documents) of information every day.

When Preston West, Senior Software Engineer for Check into Cash, was given the mandate to plan and implement the capture of all scanned signed loan documents and store them in one central location, he found that most compression options only yielded about a 20% decrease in the overall file size, and also required a decompression step on the corporate side in order to sort and file the individual images.

The LuraTech PDF Compressor SDK yielded much better results. Preston saw a 90% decrease in the file size with no visible loss in quality (from 400K to 40K). But most importantly, each file was compressed individually, effectively cutting storage needs by 90% at the remote location in addition to the corporate location. Bandwidth usages were now manageable, and he had no need for any decompression step on the back-end.

During his initial analysis, West took the costs of a storage solution over the life of the project, added the bandwidth upgrade costs, and tried to give a dollar value to the time it would take to move these files everyday. When compared to the compression solution, the differences were staggering. Even with a healthy up-front investment in the software, Check into Cash would realize ROI and more within the first 6 months of deployment and would not need to look at upgrading any software for at least a year. On the hardware storage alone, Check into Cash saved upwards of $96,600 over a three year period - not including the additional server and network bandwidth upgrades the company would have been forced to do with the amount of data needed to be processed.

The company plans to integrate the SDK into a custom program, and may even be able to make it part of the overall process to enable on-the-fly compression, instead of end-of-day batch processing.

Please visit LuraTech at the following upcoming events:

AIIM Conference and Exposition
April 16-19, 2007
Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Boston, MA
The Enterprise Content & Information Management Event
For further information visit: http://www.aiimexpo.com/

American Library Association 2007 Annual Conference and Exposition
June 21-27, 2007
Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.
For further information visit: http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2007a/