You’ve returned to your hotel room from a business meeting with a pocket full of business cards from people that you’ve met, and receipts from your business trip. One at a time, you place the cards and receipts on a desk in your room and snap pictures of them with the phone on your camera, and send the photos off to Google to be processed.

The cards and receipts are scanned, and organized for you in your documents archive, so that they can be searched for, and used in your contacts list, and in your expense report.

That example brushes the surface of possibilities of a document archiving, storage, and retrieval system of images of physical documents, described in a new patent application published by Google.

Other documents that could be used in this type of system might include doctors prescriptions, tickets, contracts, and more. Depending upon how the system is set up, just taking a picture might trigger the document archiving system.

The basic underlying premise of the system is that “the myriad documents encountered in everyday life can be readily digitized, organized, stored and retrieved quickly and efficiently.”

While this seems to veer away from a way of organizing information on the web, it’s not too distant from the company’s stated mission: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

This system is described as being intended to be very easy to use – snapping a quick picture with your phone, which then can later be easily retrieved through a keyword search.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software, plus some processing techniques described in Google’s patent filing, can have the information captured in images sent to a personal computer to be archived and stored.

The patent application describes some of those processing methods in more detail, including ways that common problems associated with optical character recognition processing can be corrected using a language model.

The patent filing is:

Digital Image Archiving and Retrieval in a Mobile Device System Invented by Krishnendu Chaudhury, Ashutosh Garg, Prasenjit Phukan, and Arvind Saraf Assigned to Google US Patent Application 20080126415 Published May 29, 2008 Filed November 29, 2006

Abstract

A computer-implemented method of managing information is disclosed. The method can include receiving a message from a mobile device configured to connect to a mobile device network (the message including a digital image taken by the mobile device and including information corresponding to words), determining the words from the digital image information using optical character recognition, indexing the digital image based on the words, and storing the digital image for later retrieval of the digital image based on one or more received search terms.