Scientists develop super-fast book scanner
The scanner allows a book to be flipped in front of the camera and then digitised - with a 200 page book taking under a minute.
The robotic device - revealed over IEEE Spectrum - is the brainchild of a team lead by Masatoshi Ishikawa, professor of robotics at the University of Tokyo. Using what Ishikawa refers to as a "super vision chip" capable of detecting details that occur far too rapidly for the human eye to see, the scanner is the first of many planned projects to use the chip.
The scanner - which was created by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe - allows you to flip the pages of a book in front of a high-speed 500 FPS camera digitising at 1280x1024. Owing to the process used to rapidly flip the pages, the image is curved and distorted - which is then corrected for with a second pass using a grid of laser light to calculate exactly how to modify the image to get a flat, distortion-free version.
While the technology is currently something of a curiosity - taking up, as it does, a large bench - the team hopes that a version of their device could one day find its way into laptops and smartphones, allowing users to digitise printed media on the go.
A video of the scanner in action is available over on YouTube.
The team is also looking to use the same 'super vision' technology to create microscopes capable of tracking individual bacteria and a full-body sensor system for computer games - similar to Microsoft's Project Natal, but even more detailed.
Are you impressed with the speed at which the device can scan books, or are you struggling to see legitimate uses for a technology which allows you to quickly and easily copy printed works? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyUnless you want to back up all the books in the world onto a database incase of a nuclear Armageddon, I don't see the point of it.
Is what I'd say if I had an actual use for it. Perhaps not so awesome for me, but it'd sure lead to awesome things coming my way, I guess.
Sounds cool, but I dunno, most books are printed from some form of digital media, so it would be daft to then have something that does it backwards, I guess it would be handy for documenting old stuff that isn't digitised at all (historians and the type).
Some people like music, some people like films, lets say my interest is books and ebooks.
It's all totally illegal of course, the right to copy a book is owned solely by the author and/or the publisher if the author waives copyright, so unless you got explicit permission (you wouldn't) there isn't a legitimate application.
Still, in a few years time there will be more and more torrent sites with pretty much every book ever.
seriously, as technology advances the old copyright laws are beginning to look more and more silly. if i buy a book and want to have a digital copy there should be no issue with that, since what i am actually doing is buying the rights to access that material, not just the form factor it is in. i am not saying the creator does not also have rights regarding their work, but we need to consider the fact that digital coping of a work for personal use does not violate the rights of the creator in any way. it simply makes it easier for us to consume.
of course then their is the issue of letting someone else borrow a book that i have digitized. . .
Jonny 5 anyone?
(You beat me to it!)
Still reliant on OCR, of course, but much faster.
how about motion capture for faces? suddenly you have a way to get minute facial detail for videoconferencing or for using as data for avatars in virtual worlds.
on the security front, I know many people might be uncomfortable with the idea, but if you have a known individual you're trying to pick out of a crowd this camera system might give enough detail to pick out a person even in a large crowd.
I already said that! :P
It would be very useful for many pirates out there! Hi pirates! :P
Perhaps. But I do a lot of reading and I have no wish to go blind reading books off a bright screen. Also you can pick up 2nd hand books for as little as a penny. People like me, who enjoy reading books, will want a real one they can hold. Not some lame pdf file that you have to read off a screen or pay £££ to have a crappy e-book pda. My opinion anyway. :p