International Business Machines Corporation

Filip J Yeskel

David U Shorter

Jorge A Arroyo

Robert M Szabo

Craig D Curley

Gregory M Bednar

Thomas C Smith

Paul L Olson

Thomas E Carr

Dorothy Irene Mazina

Lynn P Curley

Sterling Richardson Smith

James Warden Marlin

Sidney Jared Fox

Brian G Platte

Alexander Herzog

Leslie Marie Doby

Lori London Weaver

Paul McDaid

Julie Ann Pridmore

Vil Patrick Johnikin

Larry Page Hobbs, Jr

John Ray Copeland, Iii

William J Zimmermann, Jr

The present invention describes a method and system for creating and exposing order status within a supply chain of trading partners having disparate systems. A trading partner exchange (TPE) interfaces with each of the disparate systems and gathers information pertaining to a particular transaction. The information can be made available to an access platform through an access platform interface. Initially, a transaction is reported to the TPE where it is assigned a unique identifier. Subsequent activities pertaining to the transaction which are reported to the TPE by the trading partners can be linked to the unique identifier. By using the access platform, a customer or any trading partner can acquire the status of a particular order from the TPE.

Method and apparatus for creating and exposing order status within a supply chain having disparate systems

The present invention describes a method and system for ensuring data consistency amongst a plurality of disparate computing systems that communicate in order to provide an electronic transactional service. Information or data that is common between various databases associated with each of the disparate systems can be identified and monitored during communication. Once the common data gets modified, the modified data can be converted to a format compatible with all the other databases. All the other databases can then be updated to ensure that the modified data is consistent amongst the databases of the various disparate systems. In one aspect of the invention, adapters interfacing with each disparate computing system can identifications to common data. The adapter can communicate the modification to a central data control point (DCP), which can then update all other databases with the modification. During the update, the DCP can propagate the modification to adapters communicating with the databases of other application vendor product systems.

Method and apparatus for ensuring data consistency amongst a plurality of disparate systems having multiple consumer channels

High speed machine scanning of documents such as checks produces digital check images that are placed in archival storage on mass storage devices for later retrieval. Images and/or documents are automatically reviewed by a machine in order to identify images and/or documents that are of suspect quality. Machine review of suspect images and/or documents provides a reject or accept decision. Only acceptable documents are archived. Accepted documents are formed into large data groups that contain a storage location identification for each individual document within the large data group. An index is stored for each such data group wherein the storage location of each document within the large data group is contained. Digital images are selectively converted to visual images, and these visual images are then reviewed by a human operator. This operator review is used to adjust the machine's accept/reject decision making process, thereby teaching the machine the correct manner of making its accept/reject decision.

High volume document image archive system and method

An image processing and retrieval system in which images are captured and stored at the remote site where the document processor is located which codelines from the documents are captured and transmitted to a central host computer site, whereby the accounting and financial records may be done at the host computer at the central site and image statements and other image processing activity to process the image may be done at remote sites.

Method and apparatus for image processing at remote sites

A digital document image archive and distribution system includes an archive system and a distributed digital document image retrieval system. The system has communication nodes located at an image capture site and at one or more remote archive retrieval sites, these sites forming a communications network operating as a chained client/server network composed of workstation components and a capture site host computer component. An originating remote workstation retrieves a digital document image from the image capture site by creating a transaction file that identifies a digital document image to be retrieved. This transaction file is sent to a remote server workstation whereat a plurality of transaction files are batched by priority. The batched transaction files are transmitted to the capture site workstation whereat the host component retrieves a group of digital document images from archive storage, including the digital document image that is identified by the transaction file. The host then sends the group of digital document images to a capture site server workstation, which workstation then sends the group of digital document images from the capture site server workstation to the remote server workstation, whereupon the group of digital document images is sent from the remote server workstation to the originating remote workstation. A visual display is then used to image process the group of digital document images at the originating remote workstation.

Check image distribution and processing system and method

A document imaging system includes means whereby a large number of anomalous condition indicators or flags that define anomalous conditions that may occur as a result of the operation of a document scanner and/or document processor. A computationally efficient subset of flags and flag combinations is defined, and these subsets of flags and flag combinations (system states) are related to a quantitative measure of the quality (degree of suspiciousness) of the related document images, the documents themselves, and units of work that contain a plurality of documents. The machine computation of quality is compared to a human perception of quality, and computational input parameters are adjusted to improve the match of computational quality to the human quality perception, thus teaching the machine to make proper determinations of image and document quality.

Image quality analysis method and apparatus

An image processing and retrieval system in which images are captured and stored at the remote site where the document processor is located, with codelines from the documents captured and transmitted to a central host computer site, whereby the accounting and financial records may be done at the host computer at the central site and image statements and other image processing activity to process the image may be done at remote sites.

This invention is a process for interconnecting an all points addressable printer with a host application program wherein the application presents output to be printed to the printer and wherein the host application can be present on a variety of different computer equipment such as a large host computer, a standalone workstation, or workstation on a local area network and wherein the all points addressable page printer can utilize any type of printing technology such as electrophotographic, magnetic or other and wherein the printer and the application host are interconnected by communicating means such as a channel, local area network, or telecommunication line and wherein any type of transmission protocol can be used and wherein the process enables the transmission of commands and data from the host application to the printer in a manner which is independent of the communication means and transmission protocol. And, finally, wherein the process enables the transmission of a variety of types of data including text, graphics, image, or bar code which may be merged together on a single printed page.

Interface process for an all points addressable printer

Image processing system for reproducing on a bilevel medium documents having mixed formats (text, halftone, and continuous tone) by selective thresholding of scanned pel values based on detected characteristics of the material to be reproduced. The characteristics of interest for each pel include its reflectance (gray) level, a gradient value derived from surrounding pels, a hysteresis value based on the thresholding decisions for preceding pels, and a look-ahead value based on following pels. Depending on relationships among the characteristics of interest, the pel values are applied to one of a plurality of thresholders most suitable for thresholding the determined format. The determination (discrimination) process can be improved by including a novel defocused symmetry discriminator (or a high-frequency detector) in conjunction with an information homogeneity discriminator to eliminate local anomolies.

Growing community of inventors

Raleigh, NC, United States of America

Filip J Yeskel