Nec Corporation

Tadashi Ohtsuka

Yoichi Sato

Kazuo Ichinokawa

A manual image scanning system is operative to read image data of figures or letters depicted on a sheet of paper based on manual operation to input them to a personal computer for data processing. The manual image scanning system comprises a data tablet or a digitizer in which magnetostriction pulses propagate, the data tablet being adapted so that a sheet of paper on which a figure is drawn is placed thereon, and a compact manual image scanner adapted to be manually movably placed on the data tablet, the manual image scanner having a first function to recognize the figure drawn on the paper to produce data indicative of image of the figure, and a second function to sense a position of the scanner to produce data indicative of the position of the scanner. The scanning system further comprises high speed image processing circuitry responsive to the image data and the position data from the scanner to compute coordinates of the scanner on the data tablet, thereby recognizing which portion of the data tablet the image data corresponds to. Thus, this system can sufficiently exhibit features provided by the data tablet and the optical figure recognition device.

Growing community of inventors

Tokyo, Japan

Tadashi Ohtsuka