"ClearPlate" for capturing printed information: a scanner and viewfinder in one optical unit

As it is becoming more common for various handheld devices to be equipped with a camera, applications that use image recognition are increasing. Therefore, improving the usability of these devices by enhancing their image capture characteristics is becoming more important. We present ClearPlate - a new optical unit for image capture. It has a physically transparent viewfinder through which the user can observe the target directly without offset; the framed image is captured by the built-in camera. We also present a user study that evaluates ClearPlate performance in the 2D barcode acquisition task. Results show that ClearPlate significantly outperforms the camera-phone-based approach with regard to 2D barcode acquisition.