I installed libsane1 and sane-utils fom artful-proposal. Then I recognized that "sudo scanimage -L" worked, but "scanimage -L" without sudo did not work. So I created /etc/udev/rules.d/55-libsane.rules with the content:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="04b8", MODE="0666", GROUP="scanner", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

Where "04b8" is the USB id of the scanner manufacturer epson. If you have a brother scanner, you have to replace this id with the one scanimage prints out.

This solved my problem. . Read the section on Brother scanners. Once I entered the network configuration it worked.

I used the brscan4 tool on a 64 bit system. The correct driver in my case was brscan4-0.4.4-4.amd64. The page from which I downloaded was:

Hope it helps

Complete step-by-step:

In summary, manually force-install brscan4 and then run brsaneconfig4 to register scanners. libusb-1.0-0 must also be installed, which it is by default in Ubuntu 17.10

sudo dpkg -i --force-all brscan4*.deb
sudo brsaneconfig4 -a name=friendlyname model=model ip=static_ip_of_scanner

(Older models need brscan or brscan2/3 instead of brscan4)

I recommend using a static IP instead of relying on auto-detect, which still seems flakey.

The problem is that the brscan4 .deb has a dependency on "libusb" but there is no such package in Ubuntu 17.10. However there is a "libusb-1.0-0" which seems to work. The name change means that package brscan4 won't install normally, and Brother's "Driver Install Tool" sees the error and doesn't configure a scanner.

I had a similar problem with brother printer/scanner MFC-J625DW.
Could not get the scanner to work until I followed the instructions on this faq. Second item, "I cannot find the brother machine". Apparently, some files are copied into the wrong folder. My system is lubuntu 17.10 32-bit and the driver is brscan4. So also for brscan4 you need this fix. (I have also been editing the 'rules' file , but in the end reverted everything as it did not solve anything.)

According to the faq the fix is :
Check if the following directory exist.

For 64bit Users: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane

For 32bit Users: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane

Type the following command if the above directory exists.

For 64bit Users: Command : sudo cp /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane

For 32bit Users: Command : sudo cp /usr/lib/sane/libsane-brother* /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane

To clarify I will list all actions I did to get my MFC-J625DW to work (reboot between some steps may be useful):

• download, unzip and run script for your device from support.brother.com (this installed all necessary packages for my device) Follow all instructions on that site.
• add myusername to the group lp, owning the scan device sudo adduser <myusername> lp
• if you need to find out the name of this group, switch on the device, do lsusb, note the busnr and devicenr of the brother, and execute ls -l /dev/bus/usb/busnr/devicenr (3 digits per nr)
• did the filecopying fix described above
• to enable all features of brscan-skey, I need gimp, sane and xsane
  sudo apt install gimp
sudo apt install sane sane-utils libsane-extras xsane