With the proliferation of cellphones with built in camera. It may be time to empower them to replace a fax or scanner.The idea is you take several pictures of a document.Squirt these to a Personal Computer. Any distance away.
Then new PC Software would "word recognise" fragments of the document, using OO or MS-Word dictionary. Several pictures may contain the same part of the document, mathematically cross-referencing several indistinct pictures can give understanding of what the word is.The software then stitches together the document, from several reconstructed parts of different areas of the document.
You've got a machine readable document without finding space for a scanner. Or you may be on the road "faxing" documents home, with only your cellphone.
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A buddy has a Treo and I must say the photo resolution is pretty poor. I'm guessing that most cellphone cameras get used twice the first day and then never again. Anyway, my point is that I wonder if cellphone cameras have the resolution to generate a picture that would support OCR. Or if they can focus close enough.
Anyway, that's just with the current state of the art. No doubt it won't be long before cellphones have multi-megapixel resolution. I wonder what kind of data rates will be necessary and available to send the detailed image?
I do think that this is an excellent idea whose time will eventually come.
More issues that need to be fixed by software (but will reduce data quality due to manipulation):
1. Note that most cameras (all in the low price zone) won’t catch an A4 page as a rectangle (the straight lines get curved)
2. User usually can’t hold the camera exactly above the page. Which case a rectangle to look more like Trapeze.
I assume (hope) that in the future software and In-Camera-Software cameras will treat these issues.
Dekel