Software To Flatten a Photographed Book?

davidy writes "I have photographed some pages of a book for reading on my PDA. This is much faster than scanning and I don't have to carry the heavy books. However, the photographed books are not as nice: curved, skewed, and shadowed, as opposed to the much flatter, cleaner scanned books. I have searched for software that can flatten the pages for better reading on the PDA. So far I have come across Unpaper and Scan Tailor. Unpaper doesn't seem to have a windows GUI, and Scan Tailor doesn't unskew well. I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books with a camera and a laser overlay. Is there any home user software that can do a similar job without the need for a laser overlay or other sophisticated (and patented) technology?"

sooo....

[Anonymous Coward]

after photographing your book you have these huge image files that are barely readable, and now you want to spend MORE time trying to make em legible, wouldn`t it just be faster to scan em?, after OCR they would be much smaller and you could edit em/annotate to your hearts delight too.

seems like you made a problem looking for a solution rather than just scanning em in the first place

You need the proper kit

[Anonymous Coward]

There are perfectly good machines that will do this for you.

They have suction systems to turn the pages of the book, and hold the book partially open so that the pages are more or less flat. There's one camera for each page, and the software that comes with the system deals with the curving, and obviously gets the lighting right to avoid shadowing etc.

OK, so maybe these machines aren't exactly cheap ... ... but at least one publisher is using them to photograph books (ones that are out of copyright, obviously) and put them into a print-on-demand programme. The deal is that if you suggest a book to the publisher, and they take you up on your suggestion, you get a free copy.

Casio Exilim digital cameras built-in mode

[AwaxSlashdot]

Digital cameras from Casio (Exilim serie) have a dedicated to take picture of sheets of paper, whiteboards and visit cards. It detects the content boundaries, crops and unskew it. You could also save time (and money since time = money) by looking for and buying the electronic version of the book you want to read.

Hugin could help

[Graemee]

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml [sourceforge.net] Here's a tutorial to stitch scans together the slight curve of the page is minimized where the scan joins. Might be what you are looking for.

Try using one of the Planon Pen Scanners

[ArcticBirdman]

I went out and got one of the Planon Pen Scanners. Depending on what you want, they can go all the way to 600 dpi in color. Check out their web site. You can also get bargains on refurbished earlier models if you only need B&W and up to 200 dpi. http://www.planonstore.com/SearchResults.asp [planonstore.com]

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Hadlock]

If you're doing fixed height/lighting camera photography, you might as well just buy a cheapo screw mount macro lens + screw mount adapter.

Re:Snapter

[crath]

I trialed the software using files from a Pentax istDS (6 megapixel) DSLR, and since it worked quite well I purchased a copy. However, when I attempted to use it with files from a D700 (12 megapixel), it failed completely. So, I would only recommend it for 6 mp resolution files or less.

Also, Snapter hasn't released a new version in over a year; so, it's almost abandonware---it's not possible that they haven't received a bug report or two that needed to be fixed, over the past 12 months.

Net conclusion: try the demo with the actual files you plan to convert. If it works, great; if, not, don't buy it. If your files are >6mp in resolution; don't bother even toying with it.

Re:How about a $300 home-built scanner?

[MisterSquid]

Something the narrator in the bookscanner video said at the end of his video really resonates with me, which is that

powerful tools invariable have powerful effects. If everyone had a book scanner in their home, it might force the publishing industry to rethink an obviously broken business model.

Lately, I've been posting like crazy about digital print and related topics such as the conversion of paper print to digital audio [mistersquid.com]. Google started their project several years back and publishers are suing to stop the threat to the paper print business model represented by a millions-of-volumes digital book corpus. If these publishers (copyright holders) are successful, it won't be too long before efforts such as the one depicted in the Instructables video are multiplied on a mass scale, what Clay Shirky calls the mass amateurization of a formerly professional field (book publishing).

My best guess is that media incumbents will not adapt, and that what happened to the music industry will happen to all media incumbents. It's not that publishers can't change, but rather something about their culture, their collective belief in entitlement and the "rightness" of legacy media structures prevent them from pioneering the transition.

You can't say we didn't try.