Slashdot Mirror
Cell Phone with Camera = Scanner
An anonymous reader writes "TechJapan has posted a translation of an Impress Watch Article regarding a new technology developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video.
Here is the original (Japanese) NEC press release." I'd love to see before and afters to see how well this works.
NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have cooperated to develop technology which allows for phones with cameras - even low resolution cameras - to act as scanners, by having users move their camera over the surface of the page.
t oppag e/17729.html
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NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have devloped technology which uses movie recordings to produce high quality images, on par with those of a scanner. This technology will be aimed atcellular phones and video cameras.
The technique involves recording a part of the subject to a movie, while moving the camera; the "Mosaicing Technology" analyzes the moving image and estimates the three-dimensional position of the subject, and under the supervision of the "Ultra Resolution Technology," the joining points of the image are deleted, thereby optimizing it so that even low resolution cameras can produce scanner like output. In other words, even cellular phones and video cameras can produce high quality images.
Up until now, there were certain cameras that contained equipment to turn low quality images into high quality ones, but this technology marks the first time that this sort of technique can be accomplished with existing equipment. For example, a high quality image can be produced of an A4 size sheet of paper from video cameras currently on the market.
Inspired by:
http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/news_
News Release:
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/ja/0402/2303
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Because OCRing Japanese text is a lot more difficult than with English text?
I'm not kidding - there are Japanese OCR apps, but the accuracy is way below English OCR unless you're using a really good page image.
People have been scanning photos for years, even with digital cameras. My digital camera has a USB connector in it, and using /dev/usb and gocr, I Have OCR'd over 2000 pages of work using Linux.
I submitted a slashdot article about it 5 years ago, after a bit of AVing, a found the Link
Read the story here
And magazine publishers (especially in Japan!) thought they had problems before with pirating articles...perhaps this is another forced movement towards changing the way we see and envision publishing content.
A few years back a company had the same sort of software that used panning video from a DV camera to create wide-angle/fully panoramic images. It was extrememly smart and fast. I doubt anything truly new is being done here. Of course, I'd kill to have this on my 3650.
I think you mean this Slashdot article instead.
Sounds like something of a workaround to get behaviour similar to that of the old handheld scanners that used be around (I loved my monochrome 300dpi handheld, it was just something of a black art sometimes to try and keep the alignment good).
I can see why people might want to do this (panoramic photos suddenly springs to mind...), and if I hadn't been surprised by the uptake in camera phones, I might be jumping on the Slashdot bandwagon of "Who'll use it? I want a phone that only makes phone calls! I hate cell phones!!", but camera phones have *seriously* caught on, certainly here in the UK.
Check out the Samsung A-460. It's pretty small and does all the basics really well. Mine broke and was replaced with a N-400, this big bastard with a color screen. I'm looking for a downgrade.
Lots of friends have camera phones. I have a camera for taking pictures. Unlike these phones, it captures more than 1 megapixel. When I need to take pictures, I carry it with me.
If I may make a suggestion...I'm on Verizon and just picked up the LG VX3100. It's about as vanilla as they come, dirt cheap (I picked up mine off ebay for $70), stores addresses, has a scheduler and an alarm that you can use or ignore, has a great battery life, is tiny/sleek and looks great.
--trb
You can even get the code from sourceforge, although now he seems more interested in his studies into what he calls "Comparametric Toolkit", which seems to mix Video Orbits with software based on the Wyckoff principle (how to get high dynamic range pictures from one underexposed pic and one overexposed pic, for those who don't RTFL).
I suppose the amount of processing power in those phonecams must be insane, or maybe the algorithm they use is more generic, but it is good to know all this Moore's Law horsepower applied towards useful stuff, not just Laracroftish games (ducks).
Finally, it is worth of note that, although Mann's software is now GPL (I don't recall it being Free, or even released, last time I checked three years ago), at least one of the algoritms is under US Patent5,706,416, which of course is not nice, unless he plans to license it free of charge for GPL software.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
I can't believe nobody's mentioned the HP CapShare.
Link
Picture
I was doing some consulting for a lawyer in 1999, and he showed me some 'new' HP scanner he just got for some outrageous price. He told me they didn't even have it in the stores/catalogs. It was a very 'James Bond' device, you could swipe it over a large page, and the image was automatically stitched together. You could store/view pages on the scanner, or send them to an HP printer or a laptop via IR. Very cool.
eBay has a couple of them for sale.
The technique is called "super-resolution". Some references:
motion super-resolution, super-resolution in forensic science, super-resolution in astrophotography, "Bayesian Image Super-resolution", "Example-Based Super-Resolution", "Limits on Super-Resolution and How to Break Them".
C-pen works like this, the pen takes images of the book and reconstructs the line of text without any wheels needed. So any patents on this technology must be old by now.
However, c-pen takes this one step further and does OCR on it internally resulting in text only output.
I know they have tried to sell in their technology to mobile phone manufacturers, seeing great opportunities in the built-in cameras, though I suspect NEC could do it in software anyway and C-pen since has had better success with bluetooth connected pens that are more intutive to use together with your phone instead of trying to make the phone do something it was not meant to do.
It also seems that it doesn't do a lot of the things that VideoBrush Panorama does. It doesn't blend images but just sticks them there. It can't make 360 degree panoramas, it can't output QuickTime VR, it can't capture video itself, you can't fix it's misalignments and you can't do any basic image processing on the panorama before saving. It looks more like an alpha or the result of some research in progress than a software product that's actually being sold!
I remember reading about this, like forever ago.
It's called "Video Orbits," I guess. Originally, it was made to make panoramic stills from video. But it can also do the same thing mentioned in the article, sort of scanner like.
Here's the writeup and
you can download it over here.
I played with it a bit using the movie function of my digital camera, transfering to computer, then using
mplayer -vo png movie.mov && mogrify -format pnm *png && estcement.pl *pnm
(make sure the binaries and scripts are in your path)
You can play with the $steps= line in estpairwise.pl to change the settings. also, i like to take out the -display in estpairwise.pl, in order to speed things up, otherwise it draws each image on screen as it tries to match them up.
will produce cemented.pnm.
This works both as the article talks about, like a scanner, but it also makes kickass hires panoramic shots from crappy 320x240 video.
Note: turn off automatic brightness/ auto white balance when taking your video, or it make look a little funny.
no idea if any of this stuff works under windows. but it works like a charm under linux.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
http://www.printdreams.com/ Was featured on com.com in June.