Patent ID: 7059524

Claim:
A Quadrupole Resonance (QR) parcel object scanning-tunnel system for automatically acquiring and linking object identity and attribute information about each object transported through said QR object scanning-tunnel system while bearing a bar code symbol and/or identifying graphical indicia on the exterior surface thereof, said QR object scanning-tunnel system comprising: a scanning-tunnel housing having an input port and an output port, through which one or more objects can be transported; a planar light illumination and imaging (PLIIM) based subsystem, integrated within said scanning-tunnel housing, and including a pair of planar light illumination arrays (PLIAs) for producing a planar light illumination beam (PLIB) for illuminating the exterior surface of each object and the bar code symbol and/or identifying graphical indicia thereon as said object is transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, a linear image formation and detection (IFD) module for automatically forming and detecting digital linear images of the bar code symbol thereon and/or identifying graphical indicia, as said object is transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, and an image processing computer for buffering and processing said digital linear images of said object so to construct a 2-D image of the bar code symbol and/or graphical indicia on said object, and processing said 2-D image so as to read said bar code symbol and/or identify graphical indicia, and identify said object by producing object identity information; a QR scanning subsystem mounted within said scanning-tunnel housing, for producing low-intensity electromagnetic radio waves for scanning the interior and/or contents of each object transported through said scanning-tunnel housing, and automatically producing digital images of said interior and/or contents; and an information linking computer subsystem programmed for automatically linking (i) digital images of the interior and/or contents of each said transported object produced by said QR scanning subsystem, with (ii) object identification information produced by said PLIIM-based subsystem, for storage within a relational database management system (RDBMS) for subsequent access and retrieval.