Image and Scanner Interface Specification (ISIS) is an industry standard interface for image scanning technologies, developed by Pixel Translations in 1990 (today: EMC captiva).
It's 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, Makes it possible for application developers to build very complex image capture systems quickly and reliably using any ISIS certified driver.
The modular design is such that it allows the scanner to be accessed both directly or with built-in routines to handle most situations automatically.
A message-based interface with tags is used, such that features, operations, and formats not yet supported by ISIS can be added as desired without waiting for a new version of the specification.
The standard addresses all of the issues that an application using a scanner must address. Such tasks as selecting, installing, and configuring a new scanner, setting scanner-specific parameters, scanning, reading, and writing files, and fast image scaling, rotating, displaying, and printing. Drivers have been written to dynamically process data for operations such as converting grayscale to binary image data.
The interface can run scanners at or above their rated speed. 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 the need to buffer more than a small portion of the full image. Because the pipeline arrangement, each driver is specialized to perform only one function. Drivers are typically small and modular, which makes introduction of new functionality to an existing application doable with very little modification.