Electronic filing system using a mark on each page of the document for building a database with respect to plurality of multi-page documents

Claim 1

An electronic filing system for filing a plurality of documents, each document including one or more pages, each page having a mark which is uniquely associated with the document that includes that page, the mark located at a predetermined position on each page of the document, said electronic filing system comprising: input means for inputting retrieval information for each of the plurality of documents; data base means for storing and managing the retrieval information input form said input means; image scanner means for scanning each page of each document and outputting image data related to the scanned pages; storage means for storing the page image data received from said image scanner means; recognition means for recognizing the mark on each page of each document based on a portion of the image data stored in said storage means by reading a specific storage area of said storage means; and control means coupled to said input means, said database means, said image scanner means, said storage means and said recognition means for carrying out a document registration process including building a database with respect to the plurality of documents by associating each page of each document together based upon the mark on each page recognized by said recognition means and the retrieval information which is stored in said database means for each document when carrying out the document registration process.