From: Docusultant Sent: 12/19/2002 2:18 PM
Inside Innovation At Xerox: A Periodic Glimpse At Work In Progress
Printers, copiers and multifunction systems require hundreds of thousands of things happening at once, in harmony, to make a perfect print. But what happens when, like musical instruments, they get out of tune? Right now, Xerox Corporation dispatches a service technician to solve an imaging problem. In the future, however, customers may be able to handle the tune-up themselves, thanks to a new diagnostic system being designed to help solve image quality flaws in printers and copiers.
Meera Sampath at Xerox's Webster, N.Y., research laboratories is leading a team of researchers developing a customer-operated system called Advanced Image Quality Diagnostics. AIQD is intended to provide customers with easy-to-use tools to diagnose and evaluate image quality problems, as soon as they happen.
To create AIQD, Xerox researchers studied the psycho-physics of one of the most sensitive sensors in existence -- the human eye and brain. That research, coupled with failure detection technology and sophisticated qualitative reasoning technology, became the template for automated methods to determine when image quality will be unacceptable to the human eye.
In its experimental configuration, the AIQD architecture includes a PC and scanner attached to the printer or copier. A customer with a problem print can use the PC to launch a pre-loaded user-friendly, instructive software program to get a diagnosis and a solution -- in less than five minutes.
The AIQD system makes the most of three crucial pieces of information: image data, machine data and customer input. Here's how it works:
The customer launches the program on the PC, which instructs him or her to scan the problem print.
The diagnostic tools in the PC collect and analyze data from the image itself and also from the printer or copier's internal diagnostic systems.
Using a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative reasoning, the AIQD program then obtains a diagnosis and recommendation. Possible solutions include machine self-repair, repair by customer, or instructions to contact the service technician.
The AIQD system stores customers' diagnostic and utilization data, which Xerox can use to quickly and effectively anticipate or address new maintenance issues.
Printers or copiers that work in conjunction with the AIQD system will be designed with customer replaceable units (CRUs) so customers can easily replace parts.
"Image problems account for about 50 percent of all service calls, and the average service time to resolve these issues is 2 to 3 hours. That means downtime and potential loss of productivity for the customer," says Sampath. "Our surveys indicate that customers embrace any kind of involvement that will reduce downtime and get them up and running again quickly."
The image quality diagnostics team is also exploring ways to embed the AIQD system inside the printer or copier, or incorporate it into other Xerox front-end devices. Longer term, they hope to develop a remote AIQD system, which would transfer scanned files of troublesome images across an office's network for analysis by diagnostic servers back at Xerox.
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