B.c. Labs, Inc.

Yoshiyuki Okamura

Eric Bromley

Takayuki Kihara

A scanner frame comprises a vertical track which is slidably attached at one end thereof to a horizontal track. The horizontal track is attached to a drawing board or any other suitable flat surface. An optical imaging device (i.e., an optical scanner) is slidably attached to the vertical track. A marker strip comprising a series of bars of uniform pitch are disposed on a surface of the horizontal track along the length thereof. These bars are detected by a sensor assembly disposed on the vertical track. Another marker strip comprising a series of bars of uniform pitch are disposed on a surface of the vertical track along the length thereof. These bars are detected by a sensor assembly disposed on the scanner. During use, a drawing to be scanned is secured on a board, the vertical track is positioned at the left-most position and the scanner is positioned at the upper end of the vertical track. Start and finish index marks are established, either by manual selection, or by automatic reading of existing lines of the drawing, e.g. boarders. Once the extents (i.e., the start and finish index locations) are entered, the system has been initialized. Scanned segments, which are a relatively small portion of the original drawing being scanned, are stored in blocks of data which are sequentially appended by the system software to a previously scanned block of data. These blocks of data are assembled with reference to a physical location which is measured by the sensor assemblies and the corresponding marker strips. Each block is stored with a header code identifying it. Accordingly, the system software will correctly position each block according to that block's header code. This is why the order in which the document is scanned is not important.

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Kawaguchi, Japan

Yoshiyuki Okamura