Abstract: A fingerprint enhancement system has a platen with a liquid contacting and finger-touching surface. Two collimated interrogating light beams lie below and are opposite sides of the finger-touching surface. The horizontal extensions of the light beams assume an angle of approximately forty-five degrees with the finger longitudinal axis. Side surfaces of the platen are oriented normal to the incident colliminated light beams prior to interrogation. The light beam modulated by the fingerprint passes to a reflecting mirror, imaging means and a scanner below the platen. A polarizing filter lies between the platen and reflecting mirror. A second polarizing filter lies above the platen. A contrast enhancement circuit increases the modulation of the scanned fingerprint signal and automatically adjusts the level of the modulated signal without saturation. Circuit filtering eliminates spurious input signals. Finger position sensing by a light emitting diode and photo transistor is also provided.

Abstract: A text line bounding system for non-mechanically adjusting for skewed text in scanned text. The data from scanned page texts are divided into vertical swaths and all pixels at respective vertical levels within each swath are set black if any one pixel within the swath at the level is black. Intersections and terminations are found and the datum for each line is established after removing extraneous data. The skew angle of the text is then established, following which the text lines are statistically bounded. The actual text data is then rotated according to the orientation established for conventional processing.