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Camera Phone As High-precision Scanner
christchurch writes "The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page. As reported, an A4 sized page takes only 3 to 5 seconds to scan, and it is causing copyright concerns."
the copyright issue is a non-issue contrived for the story, there really is nothing to it
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The kind of companies that would worry about this have already banned cell phones in sensitive areas.
This is a non-issue.
I think that many phones in the US have already phased out the ability to run off the camera sound because of privacy issues. You can no longer buy phones in Japan that will take pictures silently. This is, of course, not to let you know that you took the photo, but rather to let others know that you took the photo.
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Yes, that's the classic Minox with the Document Copying Attachment (part #69319). Developed in 1938 and still in production, the Minox was the classic spy camera of WWII and the early days of the Cold War.
In a few places it is now required by law that digital cameras (and cameraphones) have a shutter sound that can't be disabled.
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
Those differences are prety significant
I live in Japan, and I've seen no bans on camera phones in magazine stores or elsewhere. Every single Japanese person owns one and takes it everywhere.
:)
What's more, it's common practice for people here to go to the book store or magazine rack and just stand there reading the magazines without buying them.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Autostitch/autopano/autopano-sift, along with Panorama Tools, PTAssembler, PTGui or Hugin (open source!) makes it possible to take a bunch of images, and automatically detect which sets of images can be merged into panoramas/photo-mosaics.
Using any of them on a set of partial scans can be used to regenerate the original page.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
In Japan, all new mobile phones are required to make a sound when taking photos (and since the average Japanese upgrades their phone every 6 months, that now includes nearly every phone in use). This alerts all people nearby that the user is taking the photo (though this really has more to do with the men taking candid photos of the schoolgirls). Needless to say, my Japanese phone makes a shutter sound even when it's on silent mode.
Though I agree that this is a very interesting and telling, observation, it overlooks a couple other factors in post-war Japanese industrial success.
1) The Japanese adopted the statistical process control methods of Western Electric developed by Edwards Deming. In the '80s, the Japanese were eating Detroit's lunch by producing higher quality cars using these methods.
2) The Japanese industrial base was severely damaged by WW2 bombing and all those factories were rebuilt according to state-of-the-art designs. Once the rebuilding expense was amortized, this gave them a competitive advantage.
I recall from History class that "unicausal" explanation of historical trends are generally inferior to multicausal explanations.
But if I take off my tinfoil hat I start to wonder: WHY do cellphones have cameras? Did YOU ask for your cellphone to have a camera? Did you WANT your cellphone to have a camera? Did you have a USE for your cellphone to have a camera?
A few years back, everyone was clamoring about "internet on your mobile" and how it would revolutionize your mobile experience. The telcos sunk billions of dollars into upgrading their networks for things like 3G, etc. They had a lot of money riding on the fact that people would love using the internet anywhere.
When the services started rolling out, no one in America seemed really intersted. Most web pages weren't created with mobile phones in mind for viewing on a tiny 240x360 (at best) sized screen. Portal pages designed by the mobile telcos offered things such as news highlights, sports, and weather, but who wants to pay $10 a month to check the weather whenever you want? Just walk outside! The user experience was horrible, and no one wanted the new-fangled mobile internet.
The telcos had all this extra bandwidth that they paid through the nose to set up, and they had no one to sell it to (end users). So, they invented services that would take advantage of the bandwidth, such as email and sending pictures back and forth between a user's mobile and computer.
This is the main reason behind sticking cameras into phones, and the same logic (roughly) applies to SMS and to ringtones.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
My uncle has worked at Northrop Grumman for years, and one of his favorite stories involve tourists and cameras. They used to allow Japanese tourists to tour the facilities and they would, as you say, take pictures of everything.
According to my uncle, the practice was discontinued when the Japanese manufactured a device with functionallity very similiarly to one that they had been working on. They took it apart, and the internals were identical. In fact, the Northrop logo and a chip designers initials were present on various parts of the design. (As he describes it, it would seem that the designer laid out the electronics so that his initials could be seen, and the NG logo was placed in a similiar manner).
Apparently, an exhaustive investigation was performed (at Westinghouse) and the only conclusion that could be found was that the Japanese tourists had photographed the components, and duplicated them with photographic precision.
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HP Had a product called Capshare that was a handheld scanner that you could run over a page and then it would put everything together on your PC. It was a great little product, but I don't think they marketed it well. It was perfect for anyone who was doing researcher. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/prodCategory?dl c=en&lc=en&cc=us&product=304005
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co