The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 09, 1999
Filed:
Apr. 24, 1997
Christopher E Smith, Newton, CT (US);
Ming Lei, Norwood, MA (US);
United Parcel Service of America, Inc., Atlanta, GA (US);
Abstract
A system for using OCR processing to read human readable characters that correspond to an unsuccessfully decoded code word in a bar code symbol. An imaging system captures an image of a label that includes a bar code symbol and corresponding human readable characters. The system attempts to decode the bar code symbol by decoding each of the constituent bar code characters. If a bar code characters is not successfully decoded, the system locates the associated human readable text and segments the text into individual character images. The unsuccessfully decoded bar code character is mapped to one or more of the alphanumeric character images, which are converted into text characters. The resulting ASCII data is used to create a substitute bar code character in the bar code symbology. After the bar code symbol is decoded using the substitute bar code character, the symbol is validated through check summing or other means.