Real Time Camera Phone Guidance for Compliant Document Image Acquisition without Sight

Here we present an evaluation of an ideal document acquisition guidance system. Guidance is provided to help someone take a picture of a document capable of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Our method infers the pose of the camera by detecting a pattern of fiduciary markers on a printed page. The guidance system offers a corrective trajectory based on the current pose, by optimizing the requirements for complete OCR. We evaluate the effectiveness of our software by measuring the quality of the image captured when we vary the experimental setting. After completing a user study with eight participants, we found that our guidance system is effective at helping the user position the phone in such a way that a compliant image is captured. This is based on an evaluation of a one way analysis of variance comparing the percentage of successful trials in each experimental setting. Negative Helmert Contrast is applied in order to tolerate only one ordering of experimental settings: no guidance (control), just confirmation, and full guidance.