Palm office assistants

Abstract

An apparatus capable of scanning in documents is disclosed. According to one embodiment, a linear scanner is integrated with a portable computing device and exposed to a scanning document. An image is generated when there is a relative motion between the linear scanner and the scanning document. Texts in the image are reproduced by an OCR engine in the apparatus and can be displayed on a display screen of the portable computing device. The reproduced texts can be then filled in appropriate fields on records maintained in the device or transported to another device.

Description

[0001] 1. Field of the Invention[0002] The present invention relates to portable optical scanners, and more particularly to a method and system for capturing alphanumeric characters, symbols or biometric tokens (i.e., fingerprints) with low cost point optical scanners integrated with portable computing devices such as palm sized computing devices, personal digital assistants (PDA's), smart phones and cellular phones with digital network connectivity (i.e., WAP phones).[0003] 2. Description of the Related Art[0004] Personal Data Interchange (PDI) occurs every time two or more individuals communicate, in either a business or personal context. Such interchanges frequently include the exchange of information containing alphanumeric characters and symbols, such as business cards, purchase receipts, tickets, contracts, and other types of documents. To manage the amount of information gathered via PDI many individuals use portable hand-held computing devices such as handheld computers, per...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0022] ScanPen 106 is a pen-sized, beam scanning, information collection device that includes a sensor and an associated optical apparatus that collects and focus lights reflected from a document onto the sensor. ScanPen 106 may function as a 1D or 2D scanner depending on the configuration of the sensor. In operation, a user holds ScanPen 106 and moves it across a text printed on a document. As a result, an image of the text is then captured. The image may be transported to PDA 102 for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) if PDA 102 has enough computing resources. Optionally, ScanPen 106 has embedded language specific optical character recognition engin (i.e., an ASIC) which performs onboard OCR processing thereby relieving PDA 102 of a portion of the processing burden when processing characters.

[0026] It is defined without the loss of generality that an interaction involves activities (i.e., display content, user input / output in response to what is being displayed in the subject terminal device) performed by a user with respect to the user interface of a terminal device that may or may not be networked. Some advantages of the present invention include the ability to archive documents of interest and the ability to validate the identity of those presenting the documents. Additionally, ScanPan 106, which may be powered by PDA 102, can be designed a lot simpler than those seen in the market to perform language translation.

[0032] Optionally, fingerprint recognition control module 420 identifies captured content types corresponding to images of fingerprints and transforms those images (i.e., Fourier Transformed images) to a format that can be processed for identity confirmation. Image compression module 424 compresses the captured content so as to maximize storage efficiency and transmission bandwidth utilization. OCR engine module 428 coordinates the activities of the embedded OCR processing element associated with the scanning mechanism (i.e., language selection, predictive text processing etc.). Template matching module 432 matches distinct string types (i.e., names, phone numbers, email addresses) using pre-defined rules and implements usable links based on type classification (i.e., speed dialing a phone number by interacting with a link). Software module 434 and 438 coordinate the configuration of the sensing elements in accordance to optimized configurations for scanning components (text or images respectively).

[0034] FIG. 6A shows a diagram 600 in which a palm office assistant 602 may communicate with a personal computer 606, a wireless network 608 or a general computing device 610. Palm office assistant 602 may correspond to device 102 of FIG. 1 or device 202 of FIG. 2. One of the features in palm office assistant 602 is the scanning mechanism that facilitates image scanning of a scanning object that may include texts and graphic representations. With the scanning mechanism, a user of palm office assistant 602 can input lengthy texts with ease, substantially solving the text input problem commonly seen on those portable devices without a full functional keyboard.

Problems solved by technology

Capturing the data into a portable computing device with limited user interfaces has always been a challenge.

Typically, it takes minutes to input relevant information from a business card into such device.

Although such input is tedious and laborious, a portable computing device provides more conveniences that have outweighed the awkward input mechanism.

The above text-based input, however, would discard the graphic logo, which is certainly not desirable by a business entity in a business card.

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