Ricoh Company, Ltd.

Steve Cousins

Nicole Blohm

Marquis G Waller

Gerald Donald Boldt

Tadao Yamasaki

Dale Walsh

Jonathan Garrett Adams

System, method, and software of providing a printing service. In one embodiment, a printing system comprises a cloud printing service that stores device capability information for different types of printers supervised by a print server. The cloud printing service receives a print job, identifies a plurality of the printers that are capable of printing the print job based on the device capability information, and transforms printable content and control data of the print job into a plurality of printer-specific print streams. Each of the printer-specific print streams is in a printable output format for one of the plurality of the printers. The cloud printing service provides one or more of the printer-specific print streams to the print server.

Cloud printing services for printing to different types of printers

An approach is provided for tracking and managing physical mail items using image recognition. An image is captured of a mail item and may include any information on the mail item, such as sender information, recipient information, a postmark, a cancellation, as well as artifacts of the mail item, such as seams, markings, coloration, texture, damage, etc. A unique value is generated for the image, for example, by processing the image data for the image using one or more hash functions to generate a hash value. The hash value uniquely identifies the mail item based upon the information included in the image, such as the sender and recipient information, postmark, cancellation, artifacts, etc., and is used to track and manage the mail item.

Tracking and managing mail items using image recognition

An approach is provided for performing sorting of physical mail items using Augmented Reality (A/R) glasses. A/R glasses acquire an image of a physical mail item to be sorted and generate image data that represents the image. A unique value is generated for the image, for example, by processing the image data for the image using one or more hash functions to generate a hash value. The hash value is used to obtain sorting information for the mail item from a mail item manager. The A/R glasses use the sorting information to assist the user in sorting the mail item by displaying the name of a sort location for the mail item, visually distinguishing the sort location from other sort locations, displaying information about the mail item, providing 'out of view' assistance, etc. The A/R glasses may allow the user to override the sort location specified for the mail item and override information is sent to the mail item manager.

Mail item sorting using augmented reality glasses

In an embodiment, an apparatus comprises one or more processors and one or more memories communicatively coupled to the one or more processors and storing instructions which, when processed by the one or more processors, cause: receiving a digital image of undeliverable mail and storing the digital image in a first database; causing data to be extracted from the digital image using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or by processing encoded data; causing additional data to be requested from a second database based on the data extracted from the digital image; automatically generating one or more options for the undeliverable mail based on the data from the first database and the additional data from the second database; and causing the digital image, the data, the additional data, and the one or more options for the undeliverable mail to be displayed using a graphical user interface.

Growing community of inventors

Nashville, TN, United States of America

Steve Cousins