Book scanning gets a 1,000 fps turbo mode
By Vlad Savov 
posted August 13th 2009 5:46PM
posted August 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]
reminds me of that television series that used to come ages back.. called small wonder.. :)
what happens if we flip the pages backwards? I think it would seriously sabotage the impending machine revolution. if only john connor was this wise :(
Wow - didn't I see this technology in Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge? Today isn't April 1st, is it?
@ rencheple
fine
I can't even fit all of my textbooks in my bag at once(and they are all heavy), I'd LOVE all of my textbooks to be digital.
Oh, and those textbooks cost me around $300, so I know schools could do this with ease currently.
Only problem is those money-grubbing book-producers, I know they are money-grubbing, because most of the time they make a new edition, it's almost completely incompatible with the last edition, and they release new editions every school year! (almost 1/2 of them)
I was going to say, any group of students could simply pool their money into buying one book and slash their costs by scanning/photocopying the pages. Not that I would recommend it but it has been done. The only problem is if your professor WROTE the textbook that you're buying.
Money is a great motivator, but the number one reason I would like my textbooks in electronic format is so I can use a search function. That would be awesome, and save me literally hours a semester.
What about chopping the spine off and putting the pages in a tray loading scanner?
Can you do it without needing CAPTCHA to help you figure out all the blurry words caused by the pages whizzing by so fast?
No-one seems to have noticed; this paves the way for humanoid robots who can walk around speedily flipping through books and then either speak about their contents or provide dismissive robotic commentary. Science fiction coming to life! I, for one, am excited
Folks at google should be pretty happy about this. Now they can scan all the newspapers and magazines in no time.