JPH10327307A - Information transmitter-receiver - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To transmit a data file other than character code data using a computer network efficiently while suppressing increase in traffic of a network. SOLUTION: In the case of sending image data, a world wide web WWW server section 12 describes compressed image data in a hyper text markup language HTML, the image data file is sent to the WWW from a LAN control section 10, and an electronic mail transmission/reception section 11 sends an electronic mail denoting a uniform resource locator(URL) on the WWW for the image data file to a destination. In the case of receiving image data, a URL on the WWW described in a received electronic mail is extracted and a WWW client section 13 accesses the URL on the WWW to acquire the image data file, a compression/expansion section 5 expands the received file to reproduce the original image data.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to an information transmitting and receiving apparatus used for transferring an information file including data other than character code data such as facsimile image data using a computer network such as the Internet.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art Conventionally, an apparatus for transmitting and receiving facsimile image data in an electronic mail format using a computer network such as the Internet is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. Hei 8-24232.
No. 6 is proposed.

[0003] This facsimile type electronic mail device is generally configured as follows. That is, when transmitting facsimile image data, first, an original to be transmitted is set on the scanner unit, an e-mail address of a transmission destination is input from the panel unit, and the start button is pressed. Then, the transmission original is read and scanned by the scanner unit, and the obtained image data is compressed by the compression / expansion unit and then stored in an image storage unit such as a hard disk device. The stored compressed image data is converted from binary compressed data to 7-bit character code data in a format conversion unit. Then, a header in which a destination e-mail address, a source e-mail address, a data format, a conversion method to a character code, and the like are described is added to the character code data, thereby generating an e-mail. The conversion to the e-mail format is performed by using MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensi), which is an extended function for sending images and voices by e-mail.
ons). The e-mail generated by the format conversion unit is transmitted from the LAN control unit to a computer network.

On the other hand, when an e-mail arrives via a computer network, the e-mail is temporarily stored in an external storage unit after being received by a LAN control unit. The received e-mail is converted from the character code data into binary compressed data by the format inverse converter in accordance with the above-mentioned MIME method, and is further expanded by the compression / expansion unit to be reproduced as original image data. . The reproduced image data is temporarily stored in an external storage unit and then printed out by, for example, a printer unit in response to a user's instruction.

[0005] In such an apparatus, compressed image data of a transmission original is attached to an electronic mail and transmitted via the Internet. Therefore, facsimile transmission is performed using a general public network. The communication cost can be reduced as compared with the case where the communication is performed.

[0006]

However, such a conventional apparatus has the following problems to be solved. That is, since an electronic mail can only be represented by printable character code data, when transmitting image data by electronic mail, it is necessary to convert the compressed image data into a character code as described above and incorporate it. However, since a conversion method in which three-byte binary data is represented by four character code data is defined in MIME, the amount of character data after conversion is increased to 4/3 times the amount of image data before conversion. Will be. For example, if a simple English letter manuscript is read at a resolution of 200 dpi and data is compressed using the standard facsimile coding method, the data amount will be 30 to 40 kilobytes. If this is converted into character code data for sending by e-mail, the data amount will be Is 50
It can be kilobytes. This data amount is further increased in the case of a complex document, a document expressed in pseudo-halftone, a document read at a higher resolution, or a document having a plurality of pages.

[0007] When an electronic mail having a large data amount is transmitted in this way, network traffic temporarily increases, and this inconveniences other network users. In particular, when the same e-mail is transmitted by broadcasting to a plurality of destinations, the traffic on the network increases for a long time, so that the influence on other network users is extremely large, which is not preferable.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances, and an object of the present invention is to reduce transmission of data files other than character code data using a computer network by suppressing an increase in network traffic. An object of the present invention is to provide an information transmission / reception device that can perform well.

[0009]

In order to achieve the above object, an information transmitting and receiving apparatus according to the present invention transmits a compressed data file other than character code data generated by a data file generating means to a computer at the time of transmission. An information file is generated by describing in a language specified by a predetermined file transfer service used on the network, and the information file is transmitted as an information resource on the computer network. In order to allow the receiving side to acquire the resource, location information for accessing the information resource on the computer network is transmitted to the receiving side by e-mail.

Further, the transmission / reception apparatus of the present invention, when acquiring an information file including data other than the character code data, receives the e-mail transmitted by the transmission side by the e-mail receiving means, and converts the received e-mail into a computer network. Extracting the location information for accessing the above information resource, acquiring the information resource by accessing the information resource on the computer network by the information acquisition means according to the extracted location information, and obtaining the information resource from the acquired information resource. The original information file is reproduced.

With such a configuration, data files other than character code data such as facsimile image data can be transferred to a file transfer service on a computer network without using e-mail, for example, the WWW (World Wide Web) on the Internet. The image data is transferred from the sender to the receiver using the service, and the e-mail contains location information for accessing the information resource on the WWW of the image data, for example, the UWW of the WWW.
Only the RL (Uniform Resource Locator) is transferred.

Therefore, it is not necessary to format-convert data files other than character code data such as facsimile image data, audio data, and moving image data into character codes corresponding to the e-mail format. , And efficient transmission can be performed. Therefore, for example, even when facsimile image data is broadcast to a plurality of destinations, the data can be transferred without causing a significant increase in network traffic.

When the receiver receives the location information from the sender by e-mail, the information resource on the WWW is automatically accessed according to the location information. For this reason, the user on the receiving side does not need to perform a special operation to receive, for example, facsimile image data, and automatic reception is possible. Also, since the sender side only needs to input the e-mail address information and the like, no particularly complicated operation is required, so that the sender side and the receiver side can transfer the facsimile image data by a very simple operation. It can be performed.

[0014]

FIG. 1 is a circuit block diagram showing an embodiment of an information transmitting / receiving apparatus according to the present invention.

The information transmitting / receiving apparatus of this embodiment is for transmitting facsimile image data, and includes a CPU 1 for controlling the overall operation of the apparatus, a ROM 2 in which a control program used by the CPU 1 is stored in advance, A RAM 3 for temporarily storing various data necessary for the operation of the scanner, a scanner unit 4 for reading and scanning a transmission original and outputting image data, and a compression / compression unit for compressing the read and scanned image data and expanding received compressed image data. A decompression unit 5, an external storage unit 6 for storing the compressed image data using, for example, a hard disk device, a panel unit 7 for inputting address information of a transmission destination, a transmission start instruction, and the like; A CRT unit 8 for displaying received data and the like, a printer unit 9 for printing out received image data and the like,
A LAN controller 10 for transmitting and receiving electronic mail and file information to and from a computer network such as the Internet.

The information transmitting / receiving apparatus according to the present embodiment further includes an electronic mail transmitting / receiving unit 11, a WWW server unit 12, a WWW client unit 13, an encryption / decryption unit 14, And

The e-mail transmission / reception unit 11 transmits an e-mail to the e-mail address input by the panel unit 7 and receives an e-mail arriving at its own device. At this time, the transmission e-mail includes W
A URL (Uniforum) for accessing a facsimile image data file transmitted by the WW server unit 12 on the WWW.
m Resource Locator).

When transmitting facsimile image data, the WWW server unit 12 uses HTML (Hyper Text Markup Lang) to convert the compressed image data stored in the external storage unit 6 into an information resource accessible on the WWW.
uage), and the facsimile image data file is transmitted from the LAN control unit 10 to the Internet according to HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol).

When the e-mail transmission / reception section 11 receives an e-mail addressed to itself, the WWW client section 13 extracts a URL indicating the location of the information resource on the WWW from the e-mail, and extracts the URL. To obtain an information resource addressed to the own device, that is, a facsimile image data file.

The encryption / decryption unit 14 encrypts the content of the e-mail transmitted by the e-mail transmission / reception unit 11 and decrypts the content of the e-mail addressed to the own device received by the e-mail transmission / reception unit 10. Culture.

Next, the operation of transmitting and receiving facsimile image data by the above-configured apparatus will be described. First, transmission is performed as follows. FIG. 2 is a flowchart showing the processing procedure and processing contents. That is, the user sets a document to be transmitted on the scanner unit 4, operates the panel unit 7 in this state to input an e-mail address of a transmission destination, and then presses a start button. Then, in step 2a, the transmission original is read and scanned by the scanner unit 4, and the obtained image data is compressed by the compression / expansion unit 5 in step 2b, and then in step 2a.
The data is stored in the external storage unit 6 at c.

When all the compressed image data of the transmission original is accumulated, the apparatus subsequently proceeds to step 2d,
Here, the compressed image data stored in the external storage unit 6 is read by the WWW server 12 and described in HTML. For example, if the destination e-mail address is "aa
a ＠ zzzz. co. jp ", and the compressed image data file name is" image. In the case of "tif", FIG.
The description is as shown below. And the WWW server 12
Converts the facsimile image data file described in HTML into the LAN control unit 1 using the HTTP protocol.
Send from 0 to the Internet. Thus, the facsimile image data file is stored, for example, as one of information resources in a provider server on the WWW.

When the transmission of the facsimile image data file to the WWW is completed, the apparatus proceeds to step 2e, where the electronic mail transmitting / receiving unit 11 sends the URL indicating the location of the transmitted facsimile image data file on the WWW. An e-mail to be shown is created, and the e-mail is transmitted from the LAN control unit 10 to the recipient of the facsimile image data file according to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). For example, in the facsimile image data file U
RL is changed to "http://www.xxx.co.jp/aa".
When "a /" is set, an e-mail having the content shown in Fig. 4 is transmitted to the destination. Thus, the destination is notified of the position on the WWW of the facsimile image data file desired to be received.

Note that electronic mail is generally transferred via several electronic mail servers by a store-and-forward method. For this reason, the confidentiality of the contents may not be maintained during the transfer. However, in the present embodiment, the e-mail is encrypted by the encryption / decryption unit 14 when the e-mail is transmitted. Therefore, the URL of the facsimile image data file is kept confidential and is notified only to the recipient.

Next, acquisition of a facsimile image data file is performed as follows. FIG. 5 is a flowchart showing the processing procedure and processing contents. That is, in step 5a, the device periodically accesses the e-mail server via the LAN control unit 10 according to the POP (Post Office Protocol) by the e-mail transmission / reception unit 11,
Thus, it is checked whether or not an e-mail addressed to the own device has arrived at the e-mail server. Then, when the e-mail addressed to the own device has arrived, the e-mail is received from the e-mail server.

Subsequently, the e-mail transmitting / receiving unit 11 decrypts the received e-mail by the encryption / decryption unit 14,
In step 5b, it is determined whether the received electronic mail is from a facsimile information transmitting / receiving device. If the result of this determination is that the received e-mail is a mail from a device other than the facsimile information transmitting / receiving device, it is determined in step 5c that the received e-mail is an error mail, and the mail is sent to the source e-mail address. Send back. It should be noted that whether the received e-mail is from a facsimile information transmitting / receiving device is determined by setting the title of the mail to a predetermined character string, for example, “notification from the information transmitting / receiving device”, and analyzing this character string. It is done by doing.

If it is determined that the received e-mail is not from a facsimile information transmitting / receiving device, the received e-mail is transmitted to a C
It may be displayed on the RT unit 8 or printed out by the printer unit 9.

Now, suppose that an e-mail addressed to the own apparatus is received from another facsimile information transmitting / receiving apparatus.
Then, the e-mail transmission / reception unit 11 analyzes the text of the received e-mail to detect the URL of the WWW in step 5d, and provides the URL to the WWW client unit 13. In step 5e, the WWW client unit 13 executes the WWW on the Internet via the LAN control unit 10.
The URL of the provider server is accessed, thereby obtaining a facsimile image data file.

When the facsimile image data file is obtained, the apparatus expands the facsimile image data file by the compression / expansion unit 5 to reproduce the original image data in step 5f, and causes the CRT unit 8 to display the reproduced image data. Alternatively, the printout is performed by the printer unit 9. Thus, the user can obtain facsimile image data addressed to the user.

As described above, in the present embodiment, when facsimile image data is transmitted, the compressed image data is described in HTML in the WWW server unit 12, and the facsimile image data file is transmitted from the LAN control unit 10 to the provider on the WWW. An e-mail indicating the URL of the facsimile image data file on the WWW is transmitted to the server by the e-mail transmission / reception unit 11.
Then, when receiving the facsimile image data, the URL of the WWW described in the received e-mail is extracted, and this URL on the WWW is extracted from the WWW client unit 13.
L, thereby obtaining a facsimile image data file, and expanding the received file by the compression / decompression unit 5 to reproduce the original image data.

Therefore, in this embodiment, the facsimile compressed image data is transmitted from the transmitting side to the WWW,
Since the receiving side accesses and acquires the URL, the amount of compressed image data can be reduced compared to the case where the format of compressed image data is converted to character data and attached to e-mail and transmitted as in the conventional case. Image data can be transmitted efficiently. Therefore, an increase in network traffic can be suppressed.

On the transmitting side, it is only necessary to input the destination e-mail address and press the send button. On the other hand, on the receiving side, when the e-mail is received,
Since the URL of the WW is detected and the URL is automatically accessed, the user can transmit and receive facsimile image data by the same simple operation as when using a conventional facsimile apparatus.

Further, the e-mail is encrypted / decrypted by the
, It is possible to keep the confidentiality of the contents of the e-mail, especially the URL of the WWW, so that highly confidential facsimile communication can be performed in spite of using the Internet. .

The present invention is not limited to the above embodiment. For example, in the above embodiment, the transmitting side stores the facsimile image data file in the provider server on the WWW, and the receiving side accesses and acquires the file. However, the transmitting side stores the facsimile image data file in its own external storage unit or the like. The facsimile image data file destined for the receiving side may be accessed by accessing the WWW server unit of the transmitting side apparatus.

In the above embodiment, the case where facsimile image data is transferred between facsimile information transmitting / receiving apparatuses has been described as an example, but the present invention is not limited to this. For example, facsimile image data may be generally transferred from a facsimile information transmitting / receiving device to a personal computer or a portable information terminal. In this case, on the receiving side,
First, an e-mail sent from the facsimile information transmitting / receiving device on the transmitting side is received by e-mail software, and the URL of WWW described in the text is grasped. Next, software (browser) for browsing the WWW is started, and the URL on the WWW is accessed. FIG. 6 shows a display example when the information described in HTML shown in FIG. 3 is displayed on a browser.

Subsequently, a WWW provider server is accessed by, for example, operating a mouse to obtain a facsimile image data file stored in this server, and this is displayed on a browser. The acquired image data file and the HTML description information may be printed out by the printer unit 9 as necessary.

Note that software in which a browser and software for electronic mail are integrated may be used. By using such software, it is possible to access the WWW simply by clicking the URL described in the received e-mail with a mouse operation, which is very convenient for the user.

Further, since information resources transmitted on the WWW can be viewed by anyone, it is not suitable for transmitting highly confidential facsimile image data files. Therefore, when transmitting a facsimile image data file to the WWW, a password is set in the WWW server unit 12 for the file.
Then, it is preferable that the receiving side inputs the password when accessing the URL of WWW, so that the facsimile image data file can be obtained only when the correct password is input. In order to realize this, the password is described in the e-mail notified from the transmission side to the reception side, and the reception side can input the password described in the e-mail when accessing the URL of WWW. You should do so.

At this time, the confidentiality of the password notified by the e-mail is problematic. However, since the e-mail is encrypted as described in the above-described embodiment, the password is not encrypted. There is little worry that the three will know.

In the above-described embodiment, the case where facsimile image data is transferred has been described as an example. However, the present invention is also applicable to the case of transmitting a color image, a chart created by a computer, a sound file, a moving image, and software. Is applicable. That is, the present invention is applicable to the case of transmitting any data file other than the character code data.

Further, in the above-described embodiment, the case where the WWW service of the Internet is used as the information transmitting means has been described as an example.
otocol) may be used.

In addition, the configuration of the apparatus, the transmission control procedure of the data file and its contents, the reception control procedure and its contents, and the like can be variously modified without departing from the gist of the present invention.

[0043]

As described above in detail, according to the present invention, in a system for transferring a transmission information file including data other than character code data from a transmission side to a reception side via a computer network, the transmission side device is provided with a character code. Compressed data other than data is described in a language specified by a predetermined file transfer service, this information file is transmitted as an information resource on a computer network, and location information for accessing the information resource is transmitted by e-mail. The receiving device extracts the location information from the received e-mail, obtains the information resource by accessing the information resource on the computer network according to the location information, and obtains the obtained information resource. Information resources The Lagen information files are to be played.

Therefore, according to the present invention, it is possible to provide an information transmitting / receiving apparatus capable of efficiently transferring data files other than character code data using a computer network while suppressing an increase in network traffic. it can.

[Brief description of the drawings]

FIG. 1 is a circuit block diagram showing an embodiment of an information transmitting / receiving apparatus according to the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a flowchart showing a facsimile image data transmission processing procedure and the contents of the processing;

FIG. 3 is a diagram showing a description example of data in HTML.

FIG. 4 is a diagram showing an example of an electronic mail notified from a transmission side to a reception side.

FIG. 5 is a flowchart showing a procedure for receiving facsimile image data and the content of the processing;

FIG. 6 is an exemplary view showing a display example when the HTML data shown in FIG. 3 is displayed on a browser.

[Explanation of symbols]

 DESCRIPTION OF SYMBOLS 1 ... CPU 2 ... ROM 3 ... RAM 4 ... Scanner part 5 ... Compression / decompression part 6 ... External storage part 7 ... Panel part 8 ... CRT part 9 ... Printer part 10 ... LAN control part 11 ... E-mail transmission / reception part 12 ... WWW Server unit 13: WWW client unit 14: Encryption / decryption unit

Claims (2)

[Claims] 1. An information transmitting / receiving apparatus for transferring an information file including data other than character code data to a receiving side via a computer network, wherein the information transmitting / receiving apparatus compresses data other than the character code data to generate a compressed data file. Data file generating means, and a compressed data file generated by the data file generating means described in a language defined by a predetermined file transfer service used on the computer network to generate an information file; Information transmission means for transmitting a file as an information resource on the computer network; and location information for accessing the information resource directed to the reception side by e-mail so that the reception side can obtain the information resource. Email to send An information transmitting and receiving apparatus comprising: 2. An information transmitting / receiving apparatus for acquiring an information file including data other than character code data transmitted as an information resource from a transmitting side on a computer network, the electronic transmitting / receiving apparatus being transmitted from the transmitting side to the own apparatus. E-mail receiving means for receiving mail, extracting location information for accessing information resources on the computer network from the received e-mail, and according to the location information extracted by the e-mail receiving means, Information characterized by comprising an information acquisition unit for accessing an information resource on a computer network and acquiring the information resource, and a data reproduction unit for reproducing an original information file from the acquired information resource. Transceiver.