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.
does it make phone calls?
I can make phonecalls with my scanner?
Why make a hi-res image, why not just OCR it? That could probably even be done on the phone. Then you could email or send it as a plain text document, much smaller file size then an image.
My ghEtt0 webpage.
I remember seeing news about Japanese scanner pens (smaller than any cell phone nowadays) that would let you write with it, OCR scan text, and it store the text. I don't have a link right now because I'm lazy. But those were a few hundred dollars back then - maybe eight years ago.
This is probably just a combination of that technology (which never took off here) and the cell phone feature craze.
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!
Stay tuned for the explosive shockumentary, where we demonstrate how two tin cans and a piece of string make for a handy alternative to VoIP.
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
All the people standing in front of some national icon (e.g. Liberty Bell, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben) waving their phones at each other... that could make tourists even *more* amusing!
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
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.
I'm sure James Bond and MacGiver have been doing this very technique for quite some time now.
Take care!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I think you mean this Slashdot article instead.
There is one thing that is not clear yet: How far away is "over the surface"? I mean, looking at a piece of paper from 1 meter distance is "over the surface", but I doubt it will get a high-res picture on a cell-phone camera. If I get closer to the thing I want to scan, then the field of vision is getting smaller. At the end that means that a cell-phone camera laying on the piece of paper that it should scan will only "see" a very small part of the image. So if I have to move it along to get the whole image, I'll be busy for a while, the data stream will be quite big and if I'm unlucky the camera shadow will darken my scanned movie. If I scan from a distance of lets say 10 cm away then the question is how much influence a variation of this distance will have to the result. And how I know that I got all details of the picture. And when the camera memory is exceeded. :-)
This software is from the mid to late 90s and unfortunately not available anymore. iPIX purchased the company and discontinued all of its products. There are a few links to buy it but they say it's unavailable and I haven't ever been able to find it on file sharing.
Another interesting program they had is VideoBrush Panorama. It is can only stich vertical and horizontal pans (don't even try zig-zag). It's pretty cool to be able to get panoramas from video pans, and the software is very easy to use. There is no need for a tripod. You can get an evaluation copy here. This and a resource editor might come in handy if you want to use it.
Last July there was an article here on /. about Japanese publishers' concerns that people were using their phones' digital cameras to photograph magazine pages. I'd bet they are really worried now.
Bureaucracy loves company.
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.
With the problems that the DoD has had in the past with Cell Phones with Cameras I wonder if this will get them even more scared of such technology.
Imagine if they freaked out over 1Mega Pix cameras because they could take FUZZY pictures of classified docs - This kind of technology will send the DoD over the edge. As it is right now Cell Phones with cameras are prohibited in all classified environments (at least byt the NAVY that I know of).
A Cell Phone with this kind ouf tech could be banned from the ENTIRE base/post/shipyard etc. One of the things that the drill into your brain in the service is that over time a bunch of little bits of unclassigied data can be made into a very informative report that borders on the classified.
Just my 3MegaPix Worth
i do a bit of computer vision and here could be a basic method this this to work:
.. not that hard :)
for each image
fit an affine transform to the last
[this should work easily because
1) the paper is planar
2) the paper and it's background are hopefully different - with nice edges in between
3) the lighting conditions are the same (depending on how you hold the phone)
4) the paper is not moving
each of these tranforms can be applied cumulatively to the future images, though error is reduced by mapping everything to the center image.
this takes care of the registration problem (other techniques like KLT might be useful...maybe [ http://vision.stanford.edu/~birch/klt/ ] )
then you can apply techniques of super-resolution to get a higher resolution image [ http://www.ri.cmu.edu/projects/project_323.html ]
try it
having a rectangular, planar, still, evenly-lit piece of paper helps!
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Its called "super-resolution" and there are a bunch of papers on it, using very different techniques, and different sources of images.
I also think this is used on Mars by the MOC team to produce 0.5m resolution images from 1.5m source data.
You can do this with a normal digicam btw, download registax 2 for example. Just take consecutive images of the same static subject, and combine them.
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.
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It's different because it's not just making a bunch of small pics into one big one, it's making a bunch of lo-res pics into a hi-res one. It's also different because it doesn't require YOU to do any alignment or adjustment of your composition.
In theory, you could take a 320x240 movie of the *whole page* at once, moving around, and when the movie got sufficiently long the software would reconstruct a high-res image of the whole page, as in 300 dpi or some such scanner-type resolution.
I realize that this is Slashdot, but you might try RTFA. You won't lose karma for that, I promise.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
*ducks*
Stick Men
I don't see how this could *not* require a rediculously steady hand. I have enough trouble making my digital camera photos not blurred!
This Washingtonpost article(blah blah reg req'd) may shed some light for you.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
That still left the question how the tricorder came into being. Did someone sit down one day and say to himself, "I am going to build myself a tricorder?" That just doesn't seem very likely to me.
But now I finally figured that out too. The tricorder will evolve from the mobile phone! Every year you can see how more and more sensor functionality is added, while the physical size of the phone is getting smaller and smaller. First they could just acquire audio signals. Then came video signals. Soon it will be able to monitor your heartrate, body temperature, and various other vital signs, and maybe even automatically call 911 if you get into trouble. Sensors for electricity, magnetism, seismic waves, spectral analysis, alien energy, and other things will invariably follow, driven as they are by our lust for gadgets, useless functionality, and the latest and greatest. Meanwhile rest assured that ever-increasing software capabilities will provide the ability to make rudimentary medical diagnosis, do chemical analysis, and contain drivers for every alien Bluetooth-enabled device in a thousand lightyears.
While we are at it, you can rest assured that the very moment someone develops a universal translator, it will be embedded in a mobile phone.
So there we have it: the tricorder in a small, handy package. There are only two downsides that I can see: if we are to believe Star Trek, it will at some point lose its communication functionality (Kirk was always using a separate communicator), and based on current trends the battery life may not exceed 2-3 minutes...
ALE is an open source tool that does this nicely. It is normally intended for turning a large number of images of the same thing into one higher quality image, but when you use the --follow and --extend flags. it can turn a sequence of images from a video into a single larger image.
To quote from their site: ALE is a free software program that renders high-fidelity images of real scenes by aligning and combining many similar images from a camera or scanner. The correct similarity between images is roughly that achieved by a somewhat unsteady hand holding a camera.
http://www.chiltonwebb.com/iStill/
A lot of my friends who are in the Navy stationed out of Japan already have cell phones that can do OCR on them. Not exactly a scanner per se, but they can scan in text from a from, and considering that these cell phones also can interface with the new Memory Stick Pro (1GB), you can just go to the library/book store, and stand there and scan your brains away without buying the book. (Which is why a lot of book stores in Japan now have their books in shrink wrap to keep people from leeching/OCRing for free.)
The phones can also read barcodes, too.
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
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