Patent ID: 6904183

Claim:
An electronic image capture apparatus comprising: an image detecting device adapted to capture a set of sub-images or tiles corresponding to different areas of a document at known locations and a processor adapted to receive the set of sub-images produced by the image detecting device an to process the sub-images to form a machine-readable text document equivalent to the portion of the document covered by the set of sub-images; wherein: the processor includes an optical character recognition sub-routine which is adapted to produce a first set of processable data files which each comprises a data set of characters corresponding to characters appearing in a respective sub-image in the set and relative location of the characters in that sub-image; the processor establishes a co-ordinate system which defines a template of the machine readable document whereby any point in the imaged document can be uniquely identified by co-ordinate of that point in the machine readable text document; the processor establishes a second co-ordinate system for each sub-image; the processor, after optical character recognition, stores in the processable data files the characters located in each sub-image along with the location of characters in the second co-ordinate system; and the processor is adapted to stitch together the characters stored in the data tiles to produce a machine readable text document.