Method and apparatus for organizing scanned images

A programmable scanning device comprising:

• a scanner configured to scan a plurality of document pages in a batch job including discrete regions of said pages being scanned to generate scan data representative of the scanned document pages and of associated page identifier data detected at said discrete regions;
• a memory coupled to the scanning circuit to store the scan data and detected page identifier data in separately identifiable pages, the pages being stored initially in a first order;
• a comparator coupled to the memory and configured to compare a count of the number of pages of the batch job being scanned by the scanner to a predefined count of pages intended to be scanned;
• an output circuit coupled to the comparator and configured to generate a user alert when the count of the number of scanned pages differs from the predefined count;
• a collator coupled to the memory and programmably responsive to stored page identifiers to reorder the stored page data for output in a second order different from the first order.

A programmable scanning device comprising:

• a scanner configured to scan a plurality of document pages in a batch job including discrete regions of said pages being scanned to generate scan data representative of the scanned document pages and of associated page identifier data detected at said discrete regions;
• a memory coupled to the scanning circuit to store the scan data and detected page identifier data in separately identifiable pages, the pages being stored initially in a first order;
• a comparator coupled to the memory and configured to compare the number of pages of the batch job being scanned by the scanner to a user-definable count;
• an output circuit coupled to the comparator and configured to generate a user alert when the number of scanned pages differs from the user-definable count;
• a collator coupled to the memory and responsive to stored page identifiers to reorder the stored page data for output in a second order different from the first order;
• wherein operation of said scanner and collator are controllable by program code stored in said memory, and wherein said memory also stores program code to effect character recognition analysis of said stored scan data corresponding to said discrete regions to identify the page identifiers associated with the respective pages for use by said collator to reorder the stored page data.