Xerox to patch scanner glitch that can alter numbers
Xerox will disable a scanner setting in some of its WorkCentre products that can sometimes result in figures being altered in scanned documents.
The problem was uncovered last week by a computer science student in Germany. He used a Xerox WorkCentre scanner to create a PDF of a building floor plan, and noticed some of the fine print in the document had been reproduced incorrectly in the PDF. The text that gave the area size of each room had been duplicated in some cases, so that all the rooms were given the same area.
The error resulted from how the scanner’s JBIG2 image compression algorithm works at high compression settings. If it determines two parts of a document are identical, it makes one compressed version and reuses it across all the similar areas.
Xerox acknowledged the problem Tuesday and on Wednesday said it would issue a software patch.
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