Patent ID: 8068244

Claim:
A document disposal management system comprising: an image formation device; a document management device; and a document disposal device, wherein: the image formation device comprises: a print unit that performs combined printing of a plurality of documents as a paper document in which pieces of combined image data of the documents enlarged or reduced according to a designated paper size and the number of combination are arranged respectively to N-divided regions where each of the regions is indicated by combination identification information of n/N (n is an integer of one or greater), and each of the plurality of the documents is embedded with document identification information and the combination identification information; the document management device comprises: a management unit that manages, in association with the document identification information, comparison image data obtained by enlarging or reducing image data of a relevant document according to a prescribed paper size and the number of combination, and a similarity value used as a threshold value for determining approval or disapproval of disposal of a paper document; and a determination unit that receives from the document disposal device a document disposal approval/disapproval determination request containing an arbitrary number of pieces of combined image data and pairs of document identification information and combination identification information, compares each of the pieces of the combined image data with the comparison image data by using each of the document identification information as a key to calculate a similarity value, and determines whether disposal of the document is to be approved or not according to whether all of the calculated similarity values exceed the relevant threshold value and the number of pieces of the combined image data satisfies the number of combination indicated by the combination identification information; and the document disposal device comprises: a document disposal approval/disapproval determination request unit that separates and extracts the combined image data and the pairs of document identification information and combination identification information from the image output obtained by scanning the paper document to be disposed of and requests the document management device for document disposal approval/disapproval determination by using an arbitrary number of pieces of the extracted combined image data and an arbitrary number of the extracted pairs of document identification information and combination identification information; and a document disposal approval/disapproval controller that performs document disposal approval/disapproval control to dispose of or prohibit disposal of the paper document to be disposed of based on the determination result made by the determination unit in response to the document disposal approval/disapproval determination request.