Business Card Management

Abstract

In any kind of business, contacts are very important but in today’s busy life it is not possible to remember each and every name of every individual you have met earlier. You attend a conference, you meet lot of new people and you usually exchange business cards with them. Thus, over the years, you’ve collected hundreds of business cards - some are useless and can be safely thrown into the trash bin but other cards do carry important phone numbers and other contact information that you would like to use urgently. Also we cannot neglect the fact that in doing business, time is gold and every single minute that you waste could be critical. We come across a lot of business cards in a day and to manage them properly every time is a tough task. When we need to contact any person from our business contacts urgently, it is not possible to find his/her business card immediately. To overcome this kind of situations, there is a demand of an application that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to scan business card and transfer all the gathered information into users’ business card holder digitally for managing its effectively. With this application, you will no longer have the need to carry all of your collected business card inside your wallet. Whenever you think, business card could be found in a second via searching information from the business card, such as company name, person name, contact details… Until a few decades ago, research in the field of OCR was limited to document images acquired with flatbed desktop scanners. The usability of such systems is limited as they are not portable because of large size of the scanners and the need of a computing system. Moreover, the shot speed of a scanner is slower than that of a digital camera. Recently, with the advancement of processing speed and internal memory of hand-held mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), smart phones, iPhone… having built-in digital cameras, this OCR application can be integrated into mobile phones, tablets as well as other devices. The interactive manipulation with the application must be simple, fast and effective.