Optical Character Recognition process

One of the issues that private beta users have raised when using nuebbo.com is the difficulty of incorporating their cards and their contacts details to their digital cards holders. Not everyone has a scanner, or the time required to enter data manually. One of the tricks we have used is to create a new card with the name and contact email and request our contact to update his or her card, so all details would be filled in. You can also import data from Gmail address book. Soon we will import/export from other applications such as Outlook, other mail services or from vcard files. We will also offer the possibility of acquiring a card scanner. But perhaps the most appealling feature to us now is the possibility of uploading a card and all its data from a photograph to your Nuebbo card holder.

This is one of the most powerful tools in which we are working. Our target is to upload a card and its contained data to your nuebbo card holder from a photograph taken with a digital camera or a mobile phone. When this photograph is sent to OCR@nuebbo.com, our powerful server performs the task of trimming the image and perform the OCR process on the data contained on the card. The procedure is simple:

1. Take a photograph of the card with a high-contrast background, e.g. if the card is printed on white paper, choose a dark background to highlight the edge and facilitate their detection.
2. Photograph must be clear and well contrasted to the character recognition software to read it. A resolution of less than 1Mb (typically 640×480) is usually enough resolution for digital cameras. Photographs taken with cell phones need just over 1Mb resolution. Card image should fill more than 70% of the photograph.
3. The photograph or photo set should be sent from the same email address used to log in nuebbo.com or from a mobile phone number listed in your default card. Only emails addressed to OCR@nuebbo.com will be processed. .
4. A photograph can be named or identified as follows to allow its automatic allocation to a particular category: (category_photoxxF.jpg), where category is the name of a category in your card holder, photoxx is a reference to this card and F or B responds to Front or Back side of the card. All cards meeting these requirements will be incorporated to your card holder Inbox. Once viewed, they will be organized into the category defined. If you do not meet this specification, ie if the name of the photo does not offer information about the category or side of the card, scanned image and details will be stored in your card holder and will be accessible from the menu “New card”, in the “Select from scanned images” option.
5. Email messages should not exceed from 5Mb and it may include a maximum of 10 photographs.
6. During test period, this service will not be immediate and may require several minutes to the card appearing in the Inbox or in “Select from scanned images” menu.
7. The current performance of the service OCR is estimated at 1000 cards daily, all cards received will be processed according to First-In, First-Out rules.
8. At nuebbo.com we reserve the right to limit the use of this service if there is a saturation demands. Please, keep in mind that the OCR process makes heavy use of server resources, especially when processing complex cards or in languages such as Chinese or Japanese.