SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC INDEXING AND ARCHIVING OF PAPER DOCUMENTS

Enterprises deal with a lot of papers in their day-to-day activities. Many of these papers are company confidential documents and many are legal documents with a statutory requirement that they be preserved for a pre-specified number of years. During the course of time, there is a need to (a) obtain copies of these papers; and (b) modify the contents. Such frequent handling of papers may reduce the life of the papers and lead to statutory violations. A system for automatic indexing and retrieval of paper documents involves (a) storing paper documents in a secured manner in both hard and soft forms; (b) indexing of both forms of the stored paper documents; (c) retrieving soft form of a paper document for display and copying; (d) retrieving hard form of a paper document for modification and removal; (e) managing multiple versions of the paper documents; and (e) access control and audit trailing. It is essential to maintain consistency between hard and soft forms, and image processing techniques are deployed to ensure consistency between hard and soft forms. Another form of consistency that is required to be ensured is the correct cataloging and indexing of paper documents. This is achieved by comparing input information with the contents of the cover page of a paper document to account for human input errors.