System and method for automatic indexing and archiving of paper documents

• US 7,373,365 B2
• Filed: 04/13/2004
• Issued: 05/13/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 04/13/2004
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Satyam Computer Services Limited (Tech Mahindra Limited)
• Original Assignee: Satyam Computer Services Limited (Tech Mahindra Limited)
• Inventors: Amur, Ravi G., Varadarajan, Sridhar, Rao, Korrapati Kalyana
• Primary Examiner(s): Wong; Don
• Assistant Examiner(s): CABUCOS, MARIE G
• Application Number:
  US10/823,293
• Publication Number:
  US 20050226261A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,491 Days
• Field of Search: 707/204, 382/305, 382/306, 345/418
• US Class Current: 382/306
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99955 Archiving or backup

Abstract

Enterprises deal with a lot of papers in their day-to-day activities. Many of these papers are company confidential documents and many are legal documents with a statutory requirement that they be preserved for a pre-specified number of years. During the course of time, there is a need to (a) obtain copies of these papers; and (b) modify the contents. Such frequent handling of papers may reduce the life of the papers and lead to statutory violations. A system for automatic indexing and retrieval of paper documents involves (a) storing paper documents in a secured manner in both hard and soft forms; (b) indexing of both forms of the stored paper documents; (c) retrieving soft form of a paper document for display and copying; (d) retrieving hard form of a paper document for modification and removal; (e) managing multiple versions of the paper documents; and (e) access control and audit trailing. It is essential to maintain consistency between hard and soft forms, and image processing techniques are deployed to ensure consistency between hard and soft forms. Another form of consistency that is required to be ensured is the correct cataloging and indexing of paper documents. This is achieved by comparing input information with the contents of the cover page of a paper document to account for human input errors.

Claims

1. A system for automatic indexing and archiving of a plurality of paper documents in both hard and soft forms, said system comprising:

a version management subsystem for managing a plurality of versions of a paper document, wherein the system is configured to scan each of said plurality of versions of said paper document at different times, wherein the version management subsystem is configured to manage the plurality of versions of said paper document based on a “

Version”

field contained in a cover page of each of said plurality of versions of said paper document;

a consistency verification subsystem for managing consistency of an archived paper document, wherein said archived paper document comprises a cover page and a plurality of pages, wherein the consistency verification subsystem is configured to manage consistency of the archived paper document based on consistency verification of said cover page and each of said plurality of pages; and

a cover page analysis subsystem for analyzing the cover page of a paper document, wherein, said cover page comprises a plurality of fields comprised of “

Document Name;

”

, “

Document Category;

”

, “

Document Description;

”

, “

# of Sheets;

”

, “

User Name;

”

, “

User ID;

”

, “

Date;

”

, “

SUser Name;

”

, “

SUser ID;

”

, “

Signature;

”

, and “

SDate;

”

, and wherein the cover page analysis subsystem is configured to perform said analysis based on extracting said plurality of fields along with the corresponding values from said cover page.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein said version management subsystem comprises means for managing a plurality of versions of a paper document comprising scanning of a cover page with a pre-defined format of said paper document, analyzing of an image of said cover page, identification of the “

Version”

field of said pre-defined format in said image, identification of an image segment following the “

Version”

field of said pre-defined format in said image, recognizing of a plurality of characters in said image segment, determination of a document version number of said paper document based on said plurality of characters, determination of a folder corresponding to said paper document, obtaining of a folder version number of said folder, and creation of a new folder based on said document version and said folder version.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein said consistency verification subsystem comprises means for managing consistency between a paper document stored in a vault and a folder stored in a database comprising comparison of document details in said paper document and said folder, comparison of creation details in said paper document and said folder, comparison of submission history in said paper document and said folder, pre-processing of a document page image of a page of said paper document, pre-processing of a folder page image of a page of said folder, wherein said folder page image corresponds with said document page image, comparison of said document page image and said folder page image, and comparison of image of each of plurality of pages of said paper document with image of corresponding page of a plurality of pages of said folder.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein said cover page analysis subsystem comprises means for analyzing the cover page in a pre-defined format of a paper document comprising obtaining of a plurality of field names in said pre-defined format, obtaining of a plurality of image segments, wherein each of said plurality of image segments follows a field name of said plurality of field names in said paper document, recognition of a plurality of characters in each of said plurality of image segments, and extraction of signature image based on signature field in said pre-defined format in said paper document.