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.

Comments

Here's the text of the article

[laird]

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.

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_t oppag e/17729.html

News Release:
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/ja/0402/2303. html

Re:Ocr?

[BJH]

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.

Re:that's great but...

[Ralph Wiggam]

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.

Look at Steve Mann's Video Orbits

[CandyMan]

This sounds suspiciously close to what Steve Mann et al. do with Video Orbits, automagically compositing different frames from a video, or still pictures of the same scene, into either a higher-resoulution picture or a wider-angle panorama. Sometimes the result is a mix of the two.

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.

Already been done!

[josath]

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.