Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Book-Digitizing Robots

Posted by michael on from the reading-over-my-shoulder dept.

Makarand writes "Robotic digitization systems are the new help available to complete voluminous scanning tasks. Robots that can turn the pages of books and newspaper volumes and attain scanning speeds of more than 1000 pages/hour are now available. They even use puffs of compressed air to separate sticky pages!"

2 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Scanned pages by tempestdata · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, I've seen this robot operate in person and it is a work of art. The way the arms move makes you think its going to rip the book to pieces, yet some how it manages to pick up exactly one page( It detects if its picked up two pages and drops the extra page) and flip it.

    I was the lead developer for the software side that actually does the crunching on the images. However, I'm not sure exactly how much I am allowed to talk about it so I wont. Basically, the software side of it does produce PDFs, JPGs and TXT files from the OCR performed on the images.

    --
    - Tempestdata
  2. Re:Freedom 'Bots by KrispyKringle · · Score: 4, Informative
    Interesting point. However, its useful to note that there are a lot of charitable and commercial corporations which currently fund (perhaps for the PR value rather than their own good intentions, and because the US dollar goes so far in most parts of Africa) technology initiatives and other educational programs. I've posted in the past about a program I'm involved in funded by a couple US coporations to put computers and networks in a West African university.

    In regards to your vinyl recording idea, couldn't you just hook up a record changer (yes, they do make these; they have a big spindle and an arm) to a DAT or similar digital recording device, and then use some audio software to cut tracks at blank space?