Reducing the file size of scanned letters

Question

History

This is a follow up to and old question from StackOverflow scale and reduce colors to reduce file size of scan

Unfortunately convert of imagemagick is too slow (Sometimes our system receives several images per minute. Up to now there is only one server which converts the files. If this takes too long, the customer has to wait).

Here the old question again, but this time on softwarerecs, since I search a tool and not programming hints.

Introduction

I need to reduce the file size of a color scan.

Up to now I think the following steps should be made:

• selective blur (or similar) to reduce noise
• scale to ~120dpi
• reduce colors

Up to now we use convert (imagemagick) and net-ppm tools.

The scans are invoices, not photos.

Any hints appreciated.

Sample data:

• http://www.thomas-guettler.de/tbz/example.png 11M
• http://www.thomas-guettler.de/tbz/example_0800_pnmdepth009.png pnmscale, pnmdepth 110K
• http://www.thomas-guettler.de/tbz/example_1000_pnmdepth006.png pnmscale, pnmdepth 116K

Required Features

• The human eye should not detect a big difference when looking at the image at whole on a standard monitor.
• Color reducing should be done. But not to black/white. I guess at least 8 colors are needed.
• Open source software preferred, but not a "must".
• Faster than convert of imagemagick. But don't take this too serious. Small file size is the major topic.
• Must run on linux servers in batch mode (no GUI). Don't care for windows, mac or android.

Answer 1

You can use jpeg instead of png.

Use convert on the command-line (from ImageMagick) and jpegoptim:

convert example.png example.jpg; jpegoptim -S100k example.jpg

The resulting file is about 100k.

Readable, but not perfect.

Here is the result: http://www.thomas-guettler.de/tbz/example_jpegoptim_100k.jpg