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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.
Whether some trick like this makes it happen sooner rather than later only time will tell, but eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.
It only mentions paper as the object to take a picture of, but it might also work for objects further away. This could solve the problem of the often very narrow angle lenses those tiny cameras have.
Stitching multiple images automatically is nothing new but is CPU intensive. So Moore's law will take care of that.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
I remember many, many years ago seeing people working on this sort of thing at the MIT Media Lab. The idea was that you could take a standard resolution video that panned across a scene, and by merging the frames over time create amazingly high resolution images. I remember motion being tricky to deal with (as in, things moving in the scene) because it would either confuse the algorithm that tried to figure out exactly where the camera was pointed for each frame, or cause things to blur. But if you panned across a landscape, the result was an amazingly high quality image.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Take care!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Wouldn't OCR be more difficult in Japanese than english? With english many letters are required to create a single word, thus if individual letters are not properly recognized they can still be determined by their context within both the word and the entire sentence.
In Japanese there are fewer symbols per word, many more symbols to choose from, and symbols that contain much more detail.
So I would think OCR in Japanese would be many times more difficult than OCR in english.
Finally, you now have a phone that is only useful for scanning Japanese. If it acted like a real scanner then it would be useful for any language.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
AS a visually impaired person born with a loke low resolution retina. I can say that I used this ton compensate my disability to see details if not near enough.
My brain compensated this by applying a continous eye movment (nystagmus). This allow my brain to get several low resolution moving pictures and be able to compute the missing sharpness and details.
Many born visually impaired have this nystagmus as some compensation.
I'am glad this become a mathematically and scientifically analyzed process. This is great it get some practical use. This remind me of the pictur analysis and filtering applyed to Hubble when it was known is main mirror could not focus correctly.
Léa Gris