A ground-truthing engine for proofsetting, publishing, re-purposing and quality assurance

We present design strategies, implementation preferences and throughput results obtained in deploying a UI-based ground truthing engine as the last step in the quality assurance (QA) for the conversion of a large out-of-print book collection into digital form. A series of automated QA steps were first performed on the document. Five distinct zoning analysis options were deployed and the PDF output thence generated was used to regenerate TIFF files for comparison to the originals. Regenerated TIFFs failing automated QA or a separate visual QA were tagged for ground truthing. Less than 3% of the pages in a 1.2x106-page corpus required ground truthing, resulting in a throughput rate of "fully-proofed" pages of 2x105 pages/man-week. Among the design advantages crucial for this throughput rate was the use of the identical zoning engine for the original production workflow and for the ground truthing engine.