2010-09-17

Book Flipping Scanning -- Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

Japan rapid scanning system can digitise book in one minute (w/ Video)

A prototype ultra-speed scanner capable of digitising a book in one minute will be built within two years, said the chief researcher of the team at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. The "book-flipping scanning" system works with a camera that can take up to 500 photographs per second, enabling it to record about 170 book pages in 60 seconds as a person thumbs through them.

This handout picture, released Thursday from University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, shows a prototype ultra-speed scanner capable of digitising a book in one minute, develped by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa of the Tokyo University.



IEEE Spectrum: Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

The camera operates at 500 frames per second, with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. For each frame, the system alternates between two capture modes. First it shines regular light on the page and captures text and images. Then a laser device projects lines on the page and the camera captures that as well.

The scanned pages are curved and distorted, but the researchers found a way to fix that. The laser pattern allows the system to obtain a page's three-dimensional deformation using active stereo methods. So they wrote software that builds a 3-D model of the page and reconstructs it into a regular, flat shape.



Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory


Book Flipping Scanning

Digitalization of documents has become an important technology. The technical challenge is to realize an easy-to-use, simple, and high-speed scanning system. The key point is how the system can decrease the user’s workload when scanning document information on many pages.

Our Book Flipping Scanning is a new method of scanning large stacks of paper while the user performs a continuous page flipping action.

Here we report the core of this proposed technology, which is simultaneous sensing of 3D paper deformation and the information printed on the pages. Our prototype also has a novel function of reconstructing the document image from a distorted one based on a paper deformation model.


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