Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Matsushita Electric Corporation of America

Panasonic Technologies, Inc.

Matsushita Electronic Industrial Co., Ltd

Jiangying Zhou

Daniel P Lopresti

Jeffrey Esakov

Andrew Stephen Tomkins

Prateek Sarkar

Hongwei Shi

Inventive two-dimensional barcodes, each having encoded digital information in a bitmap representing preferably randomized encoded data bits, are printed onto a printed medium. Preferably, error correction codes are added to the digital information to ensure that the decoding process accurately reproduce the digital information. In one embodiment, the bitmap may further include &ldquo;anchor&rdquo; bits in each corner, which are used as part of the skew estimation and deskewing processes during decoding. In a second embodiment, no &ldquo;anchor&rdquo; bits are required. The encoded digital information is mapped into the two-dimensional barcode in such a way as to minimize the errors caused by damage to particular rows and/or columns, for example, row damage caused by faxing the printed barcode. To extract the encoded digital information from the printed medium, the printed medium is scanned, then the bitmap is located within the printed medium. The skew of the bitmap, if any, is determined, and the bitmap is deskewed if necessary. The bitmap is then cropped, and the randomized digital information is read from the bitmap. The digital information is derandomized and any error correction codes are removed, in the process correcting and/or recording any errors discovered, thereby reproducing the original encoded digital information.

Border-less clock free two-dimensional barcode and method for printing and reading the same

In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, a user-enclosed region extraction device allows users to store, in a digital format, only selected portions of a document image. The user can enclose any text or printed material within a user drawn mark. A connected component analyzer analyzes the document in a bitmap format which allows the device to detect potential user-enclosed regions regardless of the content of the document image. A bi-connected component module allows the user to enclose a region with a mark that can be of any shape. The user drawn enclosure can cross lines of text or graphics on the document paper. A detection analyses filter uses a number of heuristics to eliminate small characters and graphics that may resemble a user drawn mark. The user can save space on the computer storage medium by extracting the user-enclosed region from the document image using a extraction module.

User-enclosed region extraction from scanned document images

The method and apparatus enables any user to search for logos in document images stored in a bitmap format. The search efficiently compares bitmap or image data by extracting a series of connected components. These connected components are grouped according to region where each region may be a potential logo. Shape and density parameters of a region are determined and compared to the parameters of the stored logo image. If a region is successfully matched then that region is aligned and scaled to the corresponding stored logo image. Thereafter, a bitwise comparison is then performed between the scaled and aligned region and the logo image. A match score is assigned to each region along with other pertinent information about the region, and is stored in a ranked logo list database. The ranked logo list database represents a list of logos found in the document image.

Identification of logos from document images

Inventive two-dimensional barcodes, each having encoded digital information in a bitmap representing preferably randomized encoded data bits, are printed onto a printed medium. The bitmap may further include a plurality of block identifiers, spaced a predetermined number of encoded data bits apart, which are used to make corrections for missing or added data bits when the barcode is decoded. Upon decoding a barcode printed on the printed media, the digital information is scanned and the number of horizontal and vertical edges in each respective column and row of the barcode are determined. An edge is determined by selecting a pixel and determining if the two pixels adjacent to the selected pixel are of different colors. After all of the edges are counted, selected groups of columns and rows are analyzed to determine local minimas in the number of counted horizontal and vertical edges in each selected group which provide the column and row center line for each selected group. Thereafter, the binary data located at the intersection of each column and row center line are read out to produce a signal representative of the encoded digital information in the printed barcode.

Clock free two-dimensional barcode and method for printing and reading

A method of locating a machine-readable two dimensional marker, such as a barcode, in an image. An image of a medium containing the two dimensional marker is processed to generate a mask containing one or more filled regions each of which is sufficiently large to contain the predetermined dimensions of the marker. To generate the mask, small image areas having a first pixel polarity which are internal to larger image areas having a different pixel polarity are first filled with pixels having the same polarity as the surrounding larger image areas. A morphological opening operation is then performed on the filled image to leave only such filled regions as are equal in size or larger than the predetermined dimensions of the marker. After the mask has been generated, the mask is logically combined with the original image to extract one or more candidate regions. The candidate regions are then tested to determine whether or not a marker is present by one of several described methods, including, for example, by attempting to decode portions of each candidate region. Based upon the results of the testing, one or more candidate regions are selected for decoding.

Method of locating a machine readable two dimensional barcode within an

The bitmap image data is analyzed by connected component extraction to identify components or connected components that represent either individual characters or letters, or regions of a nontext image. The connected components are classified as text or nontext based on geometric attributes such as the number of holes, arcs and line ends comprising each component. A nearest-neighbor analysis then identifies which text components represent lines or strings of text and each line or string is further analyzed to determine its vertical or horizontal orientation. Thereafter, separate vertical and horizontal font height filters are used to identify those text strings that are the most likely candidates. For the most likely title candidates a bounding box is defined which can be associated with or overlaid upon the original bitmap data to select the title region for further processing or display. Captions and photographs can also be located.

Title, caption and photo extraction from scanned document images

An inventive page encoding, printing, retrieval and archiving system and method wherein document information designators are encoded for pages. The designator includes information regarding the location of the digital representation of the page and optionally includes page generation and reproduction information. An enhanced copier or facsimile machine scans the printed designator and retrieves the stored digital representation of the page and outputs a 'subsequent original' of the page. In the alternative, when the copier cannot directly access the digital representation of the page, the enhanced copier can decode the page generation and reproduction information found in the designator and apply the information to production of a high quality photocopy. The inventive equipment is additionally adapted to create digital representations of pages, create designators for the digital representations, store the digital representations along with the designators, and output printed versions of the pages including the designators.

Growing community of inventors

Plainsboro, NJ, United States of America

Jiangying Zhou