Cellular phone with scanning capability

Abstract

A cellular phone is provided with a media scanning capability. Scanner optics, an optional light source and related scanning circuitry is integrated within a cellular phone to enable image or text scanning, facsimile, text-to-speech conversion, and language translation. Position sensors provide position data as the scanner is manually moved, in one or more passes across the scanned media, to enable a bit-mapped image of the strip to be created in a data buffer. Image data from the strips is processed to remove redundant overlap data and skew position errors, to give a bit-mapped final image of the entire scanned item. Image compression is provided to compress the image into standard JPEG format for storage or transmission, or into facsimile format for transmission of the document to any fax machine. Optical character recognition (OCR) is provided to convert image data to text which may be sent as email, locally displayed, stored for later use, or further processed. Further processing of text data includes language translation and text to speech conversion of either the original or translated text. The resulting speech audio can be heard locally or transmitted over the cellular network.