Slashdot Mirror
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.
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"
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.