Teaching cameraphones to read business cards

Oh this has the potential to be so very cool. If we can indeed, have our mobile devices kicking out pictures that would allow for optical character recognition, I know that I would definitely be down for that!

Exhibitions are the worst offenders. They create a pile of business cards that never get keyed into any electronic address book. Yet the solution is sitting in most people’s pockets or bags: a cameraphone.

Forget dedicated business-card readers - applications or products that promise to digitise those card details. They don’t work as well in Europe where there’s no standard layout for where on the card a person’s name, job title and telephone number are placed. So recognition proves to be haphazard. However, the majority of business people possess a cameraphone; so why not use the camera to read business card information into the phone?

One company, Abbyy, claims to have created an optical character recognition application so concise that it will run on most cameraphones. There’s still the accuracy problem, though. A certain amount of checking and re-keying will always be required.

The logical solution would be to turn all the data printed on a typical business card into a barcode that could then be read straight into a cameraphone. Traditional barcodes are recognised by swiping a reader in a single direction across the code itself. Two-dimensional barcodes can hold far more data in a small space: 1,000 characters can typically be accommodated by a 2D barcode, as opposed to 20 characters with regular barcodes…. Source: Guardian Unlimited