Patent Document ID: 6104500
Application ID: 09069729

Base Claim:
1. A processor-based fax routing method comprising the steps of: receiving into a digital computer via electronic fax communication image data representing a document that includes therein a name of an addressee for the fax communication; locating in the image data of the fax communication a keyword block of text that likely contains a keyword; locating in the image data of the fax communication an addressee-name block of text, located near the keyword block of text, that likely contains the name of the addressee; performing optical character recognition ("OCR") on the image data of the fax communication to extract therefrom texts including texts for the keyword, the name of the addressee, and other text present in the image data; determining probabilities that the text of the name of the addressee extracted by OCR from the image data is that of names in a list of possible addressees; determining probabilities that the keyword extracted by OCR from the image data is that of keywords in a list of keywords; using the probabilities that the text of the name of the possible addressee is that of names in a list of possible addressees and the probabilities that the keyword is that of keywords in a list of keywords to evaluate a likelihood that an addressee for the document has been identified; determining an addressee for the document: by comparing a best likelihood that an addressee for the document has been identified with a pre-established likelihood threshold; and by comparing a separation between the best likelihood that an addressee for the document has been identified and a second best likelihood that an addressee for the document has been identified with a pre-established separation threshold; converting all text extracted by performing OCR on the image data into email addressed to the addressee identified for the fax communication; and storing the email thus obtained onto an email server from which the identified addressee may retrieve the extracted text.

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Claim 2:
2. The processor-based fax routing method of claim 1 further comprising the step of performing image clean-up on the image data before identifying the keyword.