Have you ever heard the expression “carrying a scanner in your pocket”?
Mobile devices (phones and tablets) offer countless useful features for users, and today I want to highlight the ability to capture documents.
When I talk about capturing a document, I mean obtaining an accurate image of it—not just taking any standard photo. A document image shouldn’t have any kind of background, should be properly rotated, and must be perfectly legible. I can’t count the number of times I’ve come across document repositories full of poorly taken ID photos: rotated, low-quality, and with backgrounds showing tablecloths, tables, fingers, etc. That’s not a document repository, but rather an image repository that can’t be put to much use. For example, you can’t run OCR to extract data, you can’t verify if the document is authentic, and you can’t extract elements like the photo or the signature.
Maybe in our personal lives this isn’t a big deal, but in the business world, information management is fundamental for operations. The higher the quality of a document and the easier it is for a client to send it, the better and faster service the company can provide. This creates a clear competitive advantage, which is why we see examples of companies that allow their clients to send documentation with their mobile devices, or enable their own employees (in branches, remote offices, or even those working on the go) with mobile apps that make it easy to send documents without needing any other device.
To give you an idea of what can be done with a mobile phone, I’ve created the following video, where I show different scenarios in which a document is captured at such a high quality that you can even run OCR and extract data from it.
Do you also use the scanner you carry in your pocket?