Oblivious document capture and real-time retrieval

Ever since text processors became popular, users have dreamt of handling documents printed on paper as comfortably as electronic ones, with full text search typically appearing very close to the top of the wish list. This paper presents the design of a prototype system that takes a step into this direction. The user’s desktop is continuously monitored and of each detected document a high resolution snapshot is taken using a digital camera. The resulting image is processed using specially designed dewarping and OCR algorithms, making a digital and fully searchable version of the document available to the user in real-time. These steps are performed without any user interaction. This enables the system to run as a background task without disturbing the user in her work, while at the same time offering electronic access to all paper documents that have been present on the desktop during the uptime of the system.