USPTO Patent Grant for eBay Inc. - Business Methods

ChangeBridge: Patent Grants - Business Methods (G06Q)

Published March 24th, 2026

Detected March 25th, 2026

Summary

The USPTO has granted patent US12586107B2 to eBay Inc. for a business method related to optical character recognition (OCR) for identifying vehicles and other items using documentation. The patent focuses on techniques to improve OCR accuracy for non-cooperative images.

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What changed

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued patent US12586107B2 to eBay Inc. This patent covers a business method that enhances optical character recognition (OCR) for identifying items, particularly vehicles, through their associated documentation. The innovation addresses challenges with non-cooperative images by employing dewarping, text alignment, and line identification/removal techniques to improve OCR accuracy.

This patent grant signifies a new intellectual property right for eBay Inc. in the area of business methods and OCR technology. While this is a grant of a patent and not a regulatory rule imposing obligations on other entities, it represents a specific technological advancement that could influence future developments in e-commerce, vehicle identification, and document processing. Compliance officers in technology and e-commerce sectors should be aware of such granted patents as they may impact competitive landscapes or inform internal technology development strategies.

Source document (simplified)

← USPTO Patent Grants

Document optical character recognition

Grant US12586107B2 Kind: B2 Mar 24, 2026

Assignee

EBAY INC.

Inventors

Braddock Gaskill, Robinson Piramuthu

Abstract

Vehicles and other items often have corresponding documentation, such as registration cards, that includes a significant amount of informative textual information that can be used in identifying the item. Traditional OCR may be unsuccessful when dealing with non-cooperative images. Accordingly, features such as dewarping, text alignment, and line identification and removal may aid in OCR of non-cooperative images. Dewarping involves determining curvature of a document depicted in an image and processing the image to dewarp the image of the document to make it more accurately conform to the ideal of a cooperative image. Text alignment involves determining an actual alignment of depicted text, even when the depicted text is not aligned with depicted visual cues. Line identification and removal involves identifying portions of the image that depict lines and removing those lines prior to OCR processing of the image.

CPC Classifications

G01N 2030/628 G06Q 30/0601 G06V 10/267 G06V 10/273 G06V 10/46 G06V 10/56 G06V 20/62 G06V 20/625 G06V 2201/13 G06V 30/10 G06V 30/155 G06V 30/18105 G06V 30/412 G06V 30/413