we are soon to scan/capture palm leaf manuscripts (ancient writing
media in Asia)for archival purpose. Scanning will be done thru
Planetary Type Scanners. typical size of the manuscript is 1" x 11"
and are in dark yellow to light yellow color with scripts appearing in
medium black color.  We will lay-up 12-16 leaves on the scan-bed and
get uncompressed 300 dpi, 24 Bit, RGB TIFF files. We will slice them
as sigle leaf (master archival file) and then compress to TIFF G4 CCITT format.

This compressed files will have to cleaned up for: 
- dust removal
- clean wormmarks
- sharpening
- color adjustment
- brightness & contrast
-gamma correction
- noise
- water marks removal
- scratch marks

Idea is to enhance the look of the images so that reading is clear. We
can group similar colored images to get consistancy. Our target is to
process 10,000 images per day. Can you recommend ways & means to
accomplish this task ?

ImageMagickTM 6.1.0 is a robust collection of tools and libraries to
read, write, and manipulate an image in many image formats (over 90
major formats) including popular formats like TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF,
PhotoCD, and GIF. With ImageMagick you can create images dynamically,
making it suitable for Web applications. You can also resize, rotate,
sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image or image
sequence and save your completed work in the same or differing image
format. Image processing operations are available from the command
line, or from the C, C++, Perl, Java, PHP, Python, or Ruby programming
languages. A high-quality 2D renderer is included, which provides a
subset of SVG capabilities. ImageMagick's focus is on performance,
minimizing bugs, and providing stable APIs and ABIs.

http://www.imagemagick.org/

You might want to hire a programmer and a computer graphic artist to
help you define your requirements and build a small program that can
use Image Magic to automate much of the processing.

I am a document examiner myself, and I would archive them as PNG
files, it's lossless compression (roughly factor of 2 smaller).
In most scanning software you can predefine several scanning areas so you could:
1) divide your scanner glass in 12 strips
2) put the leafs in between
3) scan the 12 leafs to separate files with one click.
4) go back to 2) with same settings
Alternatively you can do the slicing in Photoshop. In Photoshop (*the*
image editing program) you can define a whole series of changes to the
images and then apply them to all the images in your folder (yes, even
if 10000).
Definately keep your unprocessed images, they will always be most important.
It looks like you will be doing hundreds of thousands of them, so I
would hire a team to perform the boring part in parallel !
I'll check back here to see if you have more questions.
As a document examiner I also have programmed specialized image
processing plugins to Photoshop (or equivalents) myself.

Thanks for the quick reply. 

1. We will test Imagemagik tool. 

2. I am contacting the scanning company to explore options of dividing
scanner glass in 12 or 20 strips thru their capture software. However
the plam leaves are of different sizes ranging from 1" - 2" in height,
and 9" to 21" in length. This could complicate slicing process.

3. Alternatively we are interested in working thru photo-shop plug-in
so that slicing can be done as a batch process.

4. Here is the link to see an JPG file of palm leaf manuscript. This
is laid up as 4 leaves to one image.

http://f1.pg.briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/olympusinfotek/vwp2?.tok=bcqXOMUBwwF9lrHC&.dir=/palmleaves&.dnm=DSC_0002.jpg&.src=bc

5. Also we wish to know if there are any tools that would convert
these sliced uncompressed TIFF to TIFF CCITT G4 files. Our
deliverables are uncompressed as well as edited / cleaned TIFF G4
files.

Thanks for the help

For slicing with Photoshop you don't even need a plugin, and yes you
can do it in a batch process.
I'm not sure why you want TIFF CCITT G4 files; I would recommend PNG
for lossless compression, and JPEG for lossy compression (where you
can choose the quality you need).
I just wondered how many leafs you have?

Actually the customer wants

1. Master Archival File 24 Bit RGB uncompressed at 300 dpi

2. Cleaned TIFF 24 Bit RGB compressed and for color we have limted choices as LZW. 

3. JPEG at 150 dpi for internet viewing

Since we will be grouoing these images for scanning we want a s/w that
can slice them in to several single files. We tried thru PhotoShop 5.5
via ACTION but we are facing problems since teh exact location of each
image can never to correct.


Ideally we need an application that will trace or outlines each
palmleaf images then cut them off and save to desiginated folder.

Thanks

Here's what the Photoshop CS help file has to say:

"The Crop and Straighten Photos command helps you make separate image
files from multiple images in a single scan. For best results, you
should keep an eighth of an inch between the images in your scan, and
the background (typically the scanner bed) should be a uniform color
with little "noise". Images with clearly delineated outlines work best
with the Crop and Straighten Photos command. "

So if instead of the scanner-lid you put some bright blue or green
sheet (or any color clearly different from the color of the leafs)
over your leafs, this built-in function should help you out.

good luck :)

Oh, and feel free to send me an image for testing.

Thanks for the tip. And you can download the images from 

http://f1.pg.briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/olympusinfotek/vwp2?.tok=bcqXOMUBwwF9lrHC&.dir=/palmleaves&.dnm=DSC_0002.jpg&.src=bc

Let me know in case of problem. 

By the way, are there any batch image sorter ? Idea is to sort images
based on color variations say: light yellow, medium yellow, light
brown to dark etc,. Once automatically sort this, we can run bacthes
to adjust brightness, contrast, sharpen, skew etc.,