9to5Mac  via its inside source at Apple has reported that the company is working on a scanner app for iOS. This new app will have the ability to turn the iPhone or iPad into a digital scanner. We already know that Apple is continuously working on enhancement of quality of its mobile cameras which further gives strength to this report. This new application will be a great value addition as it will give customers a native solution for scanning on the go.

According to 9to5Mac , this new Scanner application will work as follow:

  1. The user opens the app and holds the iPhone over the document or object they want scanned.  They then snap a picture of it.  Apple’s on-board software then resizes the image to ‘letter’ or business card, A4 or whatever depending on original document.  Resizing includes aligning edges that get skewed by a sigle scan point rather than traditional scanning methods.  The user can then manually change the size of the document or the use (biz card?)
  2. On board software then separates images blocks from text.
  3. This is where it gets murky.  At last word, Apple was trying to do OCR both on-device and using alternative cloud methods for recognizing text.  Third party Optical Character Recognition (OCR) vs. in house solutions were also being tested.
  4. The resulting file can then be saved as a PDF, .Pages, exported to contacts (in the case of business cards for example).

It is envisaged that the Scanner app would presumably tie into Apple’s own iWork suite for scanning documents into Pages. It is also worth mentioning that Apple in recent past has filed multiple scanning-related patents, so this type of an app could very well be real and in the works.

9to5Mac is however not certain whether this app will be embedded in forthcoming iOS 5 this or not.

Let’s see what you guys think of this new idea!         [Via 9to5Mac]