Patent ID: 7809158

Claim:
A method of detecting doubles in a stream of flat items being conveyed on a conveyor, comprising: conveying the flat items past at least one imaging camera; for each flat item, using the at least one imaging camera to capture image data that includes a side view of the item and an edge view of the item; creating a composite image from the captured image data, the composite image comprising image data of the side view and image data of the edge view, wherein the side view is aligned with the edge view of the composite image; and analyzing the composite image data with a computer that uses program logic to determine whether the composite image shows one item or more than one item by identifying data corresponding to lines representing item edges in the side view and the edge view of the composite image, and correlating the data corresponding to lines representing edges in the side view and the data corresponding to lines representing edges in the edge view to determine whether the lines indicate a single item or more than one item.