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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.
does it make phone calls?
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.
its called a fax machine.
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.
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
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/
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
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...