Effects of Document Skew

The skew, or small angular rotation, of a piece of paper as it passes beneath an image camera can have a variety of effects.

1. Produces skew in the image of the document
2. Increases the feeder, transport and stacker jam probabilities
3. Lowers the accuracy of OCR page and character segmentation
4. Lowers the accuracy of OCR character matching
5. Alters the alignment of forms processing templates
6. Increases the size of the bounding box rectangle which contains the entire page
7. Potentially results in a document corner leaving the camera field of view
8. Lowers compression ratios of run length compression methods

These effects have different probabilities of occurring and their potential impacts on a production scanning system will vary in severity.