About the ISIS Standard

ISIS (the Image and Scanner Interface Specification) is an open standard for scanner control and a complete image-processing framework. Now supported by a large number of application and scanner vendors, and rapidly becoming a de facto industry standard, ISIS allows application developers to build very complex image capture systems quickly and reliably using any ISIS certified driver.

ISIS is modular: it allows applications to control a scanner directly, or to use built-in routines to handle most situations automatically.
ISIS is flexible: using a message-based interface with tags, it can grow in a straightforward and compatible way. This means that features, operations, and formats not yet in existence can be added as desired without waiting for a new version of the specification.
Finally, ISIS is a complete specification: it addresses all of the issues that an application using a scanner must address. This includes such tasks as selecting, installing, and configuring a new scanner, setting scanner-specific parameters, scanning, reading, and writing files, and (through PixTools/View) fast image scaling, rotating, displaying, and printing. ISIS drivers have also been written to preprocess data by doing operations such as converting grayscale to binary image data dynamically.

ISIS excels at running scanners at or above their rated speed. It does so by linking drivers together in a pipe so that data flows from scanner driver to compression driver, to packaging driver, to a file, viewer, or printer in a continuous stream, usually without a need to buffer more than a small portion of the entire image. Because ISIS drivers are arranged in a pipe when they are used, each driver is specialized to perform only one function. Drivers are typically small and modular, which means that ISIS allows new functionality to be introduced into an existing application with very little modification.

Since virtually every ISIS driver has been created either by Pixel Translations, or with access to PixTools toolkits and sample source code, there is a high degree of API consistency between ISIS drivers - even drivers for scanning devices as different as a hand scanner and a digital copier.