A
system and method for
business card information reading and managing comprises a
scanner which is optional and can provide dark background, a preprocessing module, a host computer with data storage, input / output (I / O), and display devices, an information extracting module,
optical character recognition (OCR) engine, an image-
processing (IP) engine, an information organizing module, all connected to the host computer to work together. On top of the
system is the
dataflow logic, i.e. the method, which guides all the
business card information reading and management in a sequence of steps. The method is supported mainly through the
software (SW) running on the host computer, with a GUI to interact with end users and provides functions like scanning / loading images and managing result. Among the steps, there are automatic card boundary and orientation detection step / method, manual card boundary and orientation refining step / method, automatic key information area detection step / method, manual key information area refining step / method by using a set of template key information items as over-
layers on the GUI's
image display. There is also key
information extraction step which uses
optical character recognition (OCR) and
image processing to extract key information from cards and put the results in a table which can be further edited, merged with another table, and / or saved.