News

CIT, LizardTech test color, grayscale check-image compression

April 28, 2005

LAS VEGAS - Cheq Information Technology Inc. announced, in a news release, improvements in image compression effectiveness for 24-bit color and 8-bit grayscale 200 dpi check images. Checks that require 80 Kbytes or more of storage when JPEG compressed will typically reduce to less than 20 Kbytes using CIT's new methods.

"Bank operations personnel know that grayscale check images are more reliably interpretable than bi-tonal images and are amazed when we first show them the additional clarity provided by our recently introduced high-speed color/grayscale check scanners," said CIT chief executive John V. Ashley. "The advantage of color is especially important for pictorially complex checks that typically yield image quality rejects in Bi-tonal format and remain difficult to interpret even in gray."

"Banks have been reluctant to consider both color and gray capture approaches because the size of the captured image is perceived as leading to prohibitive transmission and storage costs," Ashley added. "This breakthrough in image compression removes image size as a barrier to using superior-quality color images in their distributed check image capture systems."

Ashley said the Check 21 image interchange standard is 200 dpi bi-tonal, which can easily be extracted from a color original. "More importantly, color is a solution enabler to the challenges that exist in such bank internal areas of general exception resolution, e.g. resolving image quality rejects, fraud detection and investigation, and other 'day 2' processes," he said.

The core technology underlying the check image compression advances is from LizardTech, a division of Celartem Inc.

CIT will incorporate technology advances from LizardTech into software that supports CIT's Cheq-IT line of check-scanner systems. The company expects tool-kit availability under license to the banking industry in the near future.

"We became aware of LizardTech's DjVu compression technology via their Document Express product suite," said Dr. William Wheeler, CIT's chief information officer. "Trial use of this product on checks produced very encouraging results."

The DjVu file format is an open standard and viewers and decompression processes are available as freeware.

"Around 40 billion checks are processed and cleared by U.S. banks annually," said LizardTech CEO Carlos Domingo. "This is an important new vertical market for our Document Express technology. These compression advances clearly make the benefits of color technology cost-favorable, and we are pleased to join CIT, Inc. in delivering them to the banking industry."