System and method of improving the legibility and applicability of document pictures using form based image enhancement

A system for imaging a document, and using a reference document to place pieces of the document in their correct relative position and resize such pieces in order to generate a single unified image, the system comprising:

• one or more documents to be electronically captured;
• a portable imaging device for electronically capturing said document with one or multiple images using an imaging device;
• a network for pre-processing said images to optimize the results of subsequent image recognition, enhancement, and decoding;
• a database including reference documents for comparing against said pre-processed images;
• and
• one or a multiplicity of servers for receiving said pre-processed images from the network, storing said images, performing final processing, comparing said images against one or more reference documents or against one or more document databases, and routing the processed images to one or more recipients.

A computer program product stored on a computer readable medium for causing a computer medium to perform a method comprising:

• electronically capturing a document with one or multiple images using an imaging device;
• performing pre-processing of said images to optimize the results of subsequent image recognition, enhancement, and decoding;
• comparing said images against a database of reference documents to determine the most closely fitting reference document;
• applying knowledge from said closely fitting reference document to adjust geometrically the orientation, shape, and size of said electronically captured images so that said images correspond as closely as possibly to said reference document.