Xerox devices randomly altering numbers

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Xerox devices have been reported to randomly alter numbers in scanned documents, a serious issue attributed to compression hash collision errors. The problem arises from the use of lossy compression algorithms that prioritize document space savings over image integrity. This can lead to incorrect representations of numbers, as the software may misidentify visually similar patterns during the compression process. The issue has been acknowledged by Xerox, which has included information about it in their user manual. A patch is expected to be released to rectify the scanning software and restore reliability to the "Normal" copying option.
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Holy crap. I would have never imagined a xerox machine could make that sort of error. Their scanning algorithms must be pretty darn clever to even have that sort of bug.
 
Those eunuch programmers have gotten too clever. :biggrin:
 
jtbell said:
Those eunuch programmers have gotten too clever. :biggrin:

They were very clever, to the point that saving document space became more important than document image integrity. Lossy compression should never be used when you expect the fidelity of the result to be a limited only by the resolution of the scanning process and the ability of the compression process to eliminate 'redundant' information. It's much better to see a blurry blob than a clear image that's completely wrong in any document scanning operation. Lossy compression usually goes beyond the 'redundant' and starts 'guessing' about different but similar patterns. In this case some numbers are deemed visually similar at some lossy compression ratio so it (the software classifier/comparator) selected a previously stored (seemly random) version to save space.
 

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