Im trying to look for a cheap analogue chart scanning solution (hardware with the software to analyse).
I am aware of the Panasonic scanner and solutions provided by the FTA, Continental, etc but I have been told that a company in Eastern Europe I think (maybe Poland or Czech) have come out with the software to analyse the output from a simple flatbed scanner. How accurate the results are is another matter.
If you know of this company or somebody similar I would really be grateful to get hold of their details.
Tiger: yes, we’re one and the same. My company is looking to add affordable image recognition software, providing it is upto scratch, to our digital tachograph application in order to process analogue charts automatically. I thought this would be a good place to ask. As I stated I have heard of one european company that does it but do not know their name.
Dav1d: many thanks, those links have now been corrected.
I looked into this myself about a year ago and found a white paper about how you go about the development of the software to do this. Its basically an algoryhtm to turn the circular chart data into a straight line and then a series of parameters for the hight of the line.
At the end of the day its not worth trying to do it yourself as certainly Tachomaster have tweaked the software to read really badly presented charts, and have a very low reject rate.
The Panasonic also has a firmware upgrade to ignore the hole in the middle of a chart.
Then of course you need to analyse the tacho’s, and also a flatbed wouldn’t give you the throughput you need, my Panasonic which I got for £120 off ebay (spotted it had a tachomaster sticker on it and gambled it had the firmware mod) is brilliant - just done 53 tacho’s in 35 minutes this morning.
