Patent ID: 7575171

Claim:
A method to use part of a printed or displayed medium for identifying a reference and using the reference to access at least one of information, services, and content related to the reference, the method comprising: capturing an image of the reference with an imaging device; sending the image via a communications network to a processing center; pre-processing by the processing center to identify at least one relevant frame within the image and to perform general purpose enhancement operations; detecting most relevant frame within the image and frame properties comprising at least one of pixels, axis ratio, and illumination characteristics; applying geometric, illumination, and focus correction on the most relevant frame; using color, aspect ration, and frame color, to perform a coarse recognition and thereby limit a number of possible identifications of the reference within the most relevant frame; and using rescaling, histogram equalization, block labeling, edge operation, and normalized cross correlation, to identify the reference within the image.