Patent ID: 8477992

Claim:
A mail processing system for uniquely identifying a plurality of documents having minutiae associated with each of the plurality of documents, the plurality of documents to be processed by mail processing equipment of the mail processing system, the system comprising: an image extraction module configured to receive an image captured from a post-print representation of the plurality of documents and extract image minutiae from the captured image for each of the plurality of documents; a minutiae data processing module configured to compare the minutiae extracted from an electronic file associated with each of the plurality of documents with the extracted image minutiae for uniquely identifying each of the plurality of documents; and a control processor configured to execute mail processing instructions associated with each uniquely identified document processed by the mail processing equipment, wherein the minutiae and the image minutiae are a plurality of document characteristics, wherein: the plurality of document characteristics are selected from a combination of two or more of font, pitch, key word, numerical sequence, symbol, phrase and coordinates of an area of interest on the document, the document characteristics individually are insufficient to uniquely identify one of the plurality of documents from a second document, but the combination of the two or more document characteristics are sufficient to uniquely identify the one document from the second document, and the mail processing system is either an inserter system or sorter system.