An electronic image capture apparatus is disclosed comprising: an electronic
camera
having a detector, a lens having a field of view which is adapted to limit the
radiation incident upon the detector to that within the field of view, an actuator
for moving the field of view across the document, a control means for controlling
the actuator to move the camera across the document so as to obtain a set of overlapping
sub-images corresponding to different areas of the document, and electronic processing
means adapted to receive the set of sub-images produced by the camera and to process
the sub-images to form a composite image of the portion of the document covered
by the set of sub-images. A set of processable sub-image files are produced which
each comprise a data set of characters corresponding to characters appearing in
a respective sub-image in the set and the relative location of the characters in
that sub-image. The contents of each of the processable sub-image files are stitched
into a blank text document by applying logical operators to the data in the files
to produce a complete composite text document containing data indicative of the
textual content of the scanned document.
