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US 2001/0019636 A1Published application
Image capture systems
AssigneeHewlett-Packard Company
InventorDavid Neil Slatter
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AssigneeHewlett-Packard Company
InventorDavid Neil Slatter
Estimating the term…
An electronic image capture apparatus is disclosed comprising: an electronic camera (2) having a detector (3), a lens (4) having a field of view which is adapted to limit the radiation incident upon the detector to that within the field of view, an actuator (7) for moving the field of view across the document, a control means (20) for controlling the actuator to move the camera across the document so as to obtain a set of overlapping sub-images corresponding to different areas of the document, and electronic processing means adapted to receive the set of sub-images produced by the camera and to process the sub-images to form a composite image of the portion of the document covered by the set of sub-images. A set of processable sub-image files are produced which each comprise a data set of characters corresponding to characters appearing in a respective sub-image in the set and the relative location of the characters in that sub-image. The contents of each of the processable sub-image files are stitched into a blank text document by applying logical operators to the data in the files to produce a complete composite text document containing data indicative of the textual content of the scanned document.
An electronic image capture apparatus comprising:
An electronic imaging apparatus according to any preceding claim wherein the sub-images overlap spatially at least by the width of the largest character which is expected in the document.
An electronic imaging apparatus according to any preceding claim wherein where only one data file contains a character at a given location in the machine readable text document the processing means is adapted to allocate that character to that location.
An electronic imaging apparatus according to any claim preceding wherein the processing means is adapted to identify lines of text within each processable data file from the spatial distribution of the characters identified within each sub-image.
An electronic imaging apparatus according to any preceding claim wherein the data in the processable data files comprises ASCII characters.
A method of creating a machine readable text document in a memory comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.