Book scanning gets a 1,000 fps turbo mode
By Vladislav Savov 
posted Aug 13th 2009 5:46PM
posted Aug 13th 2009 5:46PM
No matter how fly or flashy modern scanners become, there's no getting away from their page-by-page assembly line style of operation. Or so we thought. The Ishikawa Komuro Lab at Tokyo University has demonstrated a prototype scanner capable of recording the contents of pages as they turn. Using a laser range projector to estimate page geometry, the camera adjusts for light and movement distortion as necessary and retains faithful copies of the original. At present it's more a proof of concept for the underlying vision processing unit than a commercial venture, but all it needs is one major manufacturer to pick it up and the paperless revolution can finally get started in earnest.[Via Plastic Pals]
eersie!
I want a video of this thing in action.
Seriously, Video or it didn't happen!
Yes, we need proof.
its quite a page turner......
ba boom!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbkbU32X5dI&feature=related#t=0m41s
@splitmetal
oh god did i love short circuit as a child
I learned a lot of my cusswords from that movie *happy sigh*
Johnny Five: Los locos kick your ass. Los locos kick your face. Los locos kick your balls INTO OUTER SPACE!
Ben Jarhvi: [angrily] Number Johnny Five!
I can see people having fun with it, trying to outsmart the machine by flipping the pages really fast.
Yes, the librarians in charge of digitizing books really get off on trying to find a way to make the mindless task of scanning books more difficult and time-consuming.
if only i could read that fast...
alt.binaries.e-books
Johnny 5 is alive
dammit, beat me to it.
Two excellent books. May I have these craphead?
I was going to make this joke if you hadn't.
^ Oh, they made the joke in the read article. (Great minds...)
Damn that sounds awesome.
Forget the Zune HD, I want one of these.
Personally I'd take both... unless there's some way to listen to music/watch videos on this thing... hmm...
Input!
Textbooks my ass.
Short Circuit flashback!
Is that really how they do it?
IIIIINNNPUUUUT.
NEEEEED INPUT!
Ahh yes, it can read books at 1000fps, but can it play Crysis @ 60?
I bet you think you were clever..
good idea but i believe they would have to build something that would flip the pages properly so not to skip a page and the whole page gets shown on the camera.
YES! I can make scans of my ass into a flipbook!
gimme a portable one that I can sneak into a Vegas casino and you've got a sale.
someone will scan a Harry potter book and J. K. Rowling will sue
You will be assimilated!
Ok, scanning is taken care of. Who wants to do the recognition?
What's so wrong with regular paper?
It's bad for the environment and it can be a pain to organize.
"Scanning" text really fast is great. Using lasers to undistort the page is great. Now lets see the machine create text for all the pages that lumped together when you flipped through. Or lets see it create the text for all the pages where the print wasn't out the outside half of the page. I'm not sure "flipping through" is going to get most books open far enough where you're going to be able to read print clear to the spine.
It seems to me that the easiest way around this would be to OCR the areas where there's usually a page number and make sure you have all the pages, then flag the missing ones for rescanning. Also do an image quality check to flag other pages for rescanning.
Now we wait for the micro version. Studying would be a lot easier... wait, what studying?
My company has about 30 high speed scanners that do about 300 pages per minute, way short of this, but they are still impressive as hell to watch. Especially compared to the stuff you can buy for the home.
Why not use an MRI scanner and scan the entire book without even opening it? The resolution of MRI is certainly good enough, just feed a pile of book through on a conveyor belt.
Did you ever read Inherit The Stars by James P Hogan? Sounds just like that.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
fot the future of book scanning!
I thought about Rainbows End also when I saw this article. I am just not sure if destructive scanning would ever be accepted.
I've scanned books, and this just doesn't seem feasible. First off, what happens if two pages are stuck together? you have to go to some point you don't know in a cropping program= efficiency lost. And can it calculate the differences between hard cover, soft cover, large volumes ect.? it makes a tremendous difference. Plus cost wise, automatic systems are incredibly expensive, while two DSLRs connected to a generic machine in a scanning enclosure is comparably much cheaper. Some of the systems where the spines are cut work, but nowadays you need physical copies for archiving purposes anyways.
You simply OCR the pagenumbers and if one is missed get a guy to do that page manually, that would still beat the manual effort used currently to do page after page slowly with a factor of tens of thousand.
I am still looking for a place to buy the mini Johnny 5's from the second movie, Ebay has let me down!!!
This new scanner will be awesome when it can say "Los Locos kick your butt, Los Locos kick your face, Los Locos kick your.........
or...you know....publishers could release all their books on ebooks for a decent price (mostly textbooks) versus selling them 10% cheaper than the hardcover book then not being able to sell it back for any money at all.
why go through the trouble of scanning when the publisher has the book digitally anyway?
Gives new meaning to speed reading. Now, how do I hook up on of these things to my brain?
Let me know if you ever find out :3