Patent ID: 7870999

Claim:
An Internet-based shipping, tracking, and delivery network, comprising: a data collection and processing center operably connected to the infrastructure of the Internet, and including a RDBMS for storing and managing shipping information; a plurality of pickup/delivery vehicles, wherein each said pickup/delivery vehicle is equipped with a mobile digital image capture and processing (MICAP) system for (i) at points of shipment pickup, capturing and processing digital images of shipping documents, bearing embedded bar codes, (ii) automatically decoding embedded bar codes in said shipping documents, and performing optical character recognition (OCR) on text presented in said shipping documents, (iii) formatting captured digital images of the shipping documents with said OCR recognized information, and (iv) transmitting the formatted digital images to said data collection and processing center, for automatic recognition processing and population of said RDBMS maintained by said Internet-based shipping, tracking, and delivery network.