Patent ID: 7832643

Claim:
A hand-supportable planar laser illumination and imaging (PLIIM) based system comprising: a hand-supportable housing having a light transmission aperture; an image formation and detection module, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, and having an image detection array and image formation optics with a field of view (FOV) extending from said image detection array, through said light transmission aperture and onto an object moving relative to said hand-supportable housing during object illumination and imaging operations; a planar laser illumination beam (PLIB) producing device, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, and having at least one visible laser illumination source arranged in relation to said image formation and detection module, for producing a planar laser illumination beam (PLIB), and projecting said PLIB through said light transmission aperture and oriented such that the plane of said PLIB is coplanar with the field of view of said image formation and detection module so that the object can be simultaneously illuminated by said PLIB and imaged within said field of view and onto said image detection array for detection as a digital linear image of the object; a laser despeckling mechanism, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, for reducing the coherence of said PLIB during object illumination and imaging operations so that the power of speckle-pattern noise is substantially reduced in digital linear images detected on said image detection array; an image grabber, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, for grabbing digital linear images formed and detected by said image formation and detection module; an image data buffer, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, for buffering said digital linear images grabbed by said image grabber; an image processor, disposed in said hand-supportable housing, and operably associated with said image data buffer, for processing said buffered digital linear images so as to read code symbols graphically represented in said digital linear images; and a controller for automatically controlling one or more of said linear image formation and detection module, said PLIB producing device, said image frame grabber, said image data buffer and said image processor.