With distributed office environment and virtual interaction becoming more dominant, a original document could be modified digitally and marked on printed hard copy by multiple individuals. Software document management solutions are available to manage digitally modified document from multiple users. However, no convenient method exists for hand marked document especially for tracking, archiving, composing and reproducing documents that has been individually modified but from a common original source. In this paper we propose a method that enables preserving multiple users generated modifications made to a common original document. One single composite document is generated. The composite document that can be re-produced without loss of quality contains the original document and all user markings. In the composite document, the original document content is preserved and user marking can also be indexed and converted to other format using technologies such as optical character recognition. The new document is also much smaller in terms of file size for the ease of transmission and archiving without loss of quality for both the original content and the user applied modifications.
Mu Qiao, "An Image Processing Method that Enables Efficient Document Management and Reproduction in a Distributed Working Environment" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP27), 2011, pp 552 - 555, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2011.27.1.art00036_2