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."

Comments

After reading the article

[zegebbers]

you may notice that any copyright quotes don't even seem to be related to the phone!

should read...

[KillShill]

"as reported, DRM/Insidious Computing technology
will prevent lawful uses by the true owners of products. It is causing copyright concerns."

copyright gives you the right to use a copyrighted product in any way you choose. the original agreement was for copyright law to be law only. that means it is up to the courts and the legal system to decide if there has been infringement. technical methods to prevent lawful use is an infringement itself.

from my point of view, any product that prevents you using your purchased product in a lawful manner (everything except distribution), results in the immediate revocation of the company's copyright priviledges.

you want DRM/Insidious Computing, fine. but in doing so, you forfeit your copyright protections. that means it becomes in essence, a trade secret. if someone cracks the protec^H^prevention scheme, then they can legally and ethically release all of the information for free into the public domain.

now all we need are some reasonable judges and congre^H^H(well you can't have everything...)who won't listen to steamboat willie's copyright cartel.

Re:Just like spy cameras.

[CDMA_Demo]

The MC50 already does quite a bit of that. It has a camera and a barcode scanner which can easily do all that. Putting the same functionality into a cellphone is not that difficult. I wonder whats up with all the not-so-new-news lately on slashdot.

Re:Doesn't sound so convenient...

[Chuck Chunder]

Sensible:
A truck "beeping" annoyingly when it reverses to alert people nearby that they might be in danger of being run over and horribly maimed or killed.

Stupid:
A phone "beeping" annoyingly to alert people nearby that they might be in danger of "losing" some "intellectual property".

Ummm little late to the part aren't they?

[Allnighterking]

consider this patent. Mouse/scanner or the ability to purchase this Pen Scanner or god forbid instead of using the phone the person turned around and used the Xeorox. *sigh*

No it's more a case of someone shouting "Quick close the barn doors the horses have all left!"

Re:All new technologies == threats to copyright!

[daninbusiness]

What TFA fails to mention is that this is a concern raised in Japan about technology from a Japanese company.

Don't forget that the Japanese have had 1.3 megapixel or greater quality cameras in their phones for years, and this isn't the first time that there's been articles about bookstore / magazine store owners (allegedly) complaining about people abusing technology in a way that might affect their revenue.

This being the same Japan where the video game industry gets its panties in a bunch over used game sales, video game rentals are illegal, music cd rentals are okay, and importing of foreign-produced cd's is now illegal - the point is, the copyright standards and the way the gov't and corporations twist the laws to fill their pockets are a bit different than those in the rest of the world. Jumping to conclusions about these devices based on complaints probably pressured by the bureaucatic excesses of one gov't seems a bit premature at this point.

real-time super-resolution & 3D model generati

[LionKimbro]

So, according to the article, we will see this commercially around 2008-2010.

Justin Rattner tells us that in 2015, we should expect to see real-time super-resolution from cell cameras. That is, the ability to pick up several frames, and figure out more about the image, in real time, just based on the offsetting from holding a camera with a minute unconscious shake. (The problem is parallelizable, and 2015's x10-x100 core systems should take care of it.)

We already have the software to construct models & textures, after some rendering, from video footage.

If we could do real-time super-resolution in 2015, then it makes sense to me that, with some processing time, cell phone cameras in 2015 will render 3D-model textures and models. If the 4G network is around by then, (and it should be,) we could very well see instead that the data is sent to more powerful processing arrays elsewhere, (ie, on your home computers, or on Google's computers) and rendered into models in real-time. 4G is around 20Mb, perhaps 3G at 3Mb is enough to transmit low-grade video capture in real-time; Enough to make our 3D models in real time as well.

Presently, the OCR cameras require some rendering time. That requirement will clearly be gone by 2015; The cameras will automatically OCR text that is identified on-screen. (Perhaps the alarm will be a constant chirping buzz, whenever you use it?)

As a side note: Perhaps Google maps of the future will learn about what street names go to what streets, simply by recognizing and reading the sign posts.

What do you want to bet Google's going to get video footage of every city, and crank it into full-on 3D models? You better believe it. I'm betting on 2015, tops. (Who knows; I wouldn't be shocked if they weren't cranking on their Seattle footage now.)

We should also expect, I think, that the public will assemble it's own models from public footage. Volunteers will capture footage with their cell phones (or, if they are showing off, sophisticated digital video recordsers,) and feed it to a public free culture grid, which will churn out 3D models and textures for distribution and retrieval.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Are these outlandish thoughts for 2015? No! You can't have your Flying Car! Down boy! Retrain your imagination! Yes, people have predicted the future before; read about NISTEP's 1970's predictions for 1990-2000.

Not a unique copyright issue

[Dachannien]

It's already illegal in Ohio to operate a camera phone (or any other video camera) in a movie theater, even in the lobby. For that matter, this applies in any business where a copyrighted work is being shown - such as Wal-Mart if they're showing movies on their TVs. You don't even have to record from the copyrighted material to get arrested and charged - just turn on the record function and you're guilty (and it's a felony on the second offense). What's more, the business owner is allowed to detain you until the police arrive.

Old idea...

[martijnd]

I thought of it only last week, of course, I didn't patent it. Bugger. So pick my brain for prior art.

But I figured that I could more rapidly, and non-destructively scan my dead-wood collection of books if I could use the USB Cam attached to my computer. Much faster than a flatbed scanner.

You would need an algorithm that ensures that you can scan the whole page as you hold the camera, stitching the parts together, and ignoring things outside the page area. Then feed the result into an OCR routine to get a text version.

Most (nearly) books are high contrast, black on white (or yellowish depending on book age) so the page boundaries shouldn't be too hard to detect.

Now make a nice little programme to wrap this in, and you can "quickly" convert your favorite books into a format that can be read on a PDA, most of which will never be realised in any usefull digital form anyway.

Plan B was just to use a digital camera to fotograph each page, and then feed the memory card into the OCR algorithm. Probably a lot easier.

This seems to be an idea along very similar lines; I predict that we reach the pre-MP3 stage for books very soon now (when it took 10+ minutes to encode a single CD track on a P90) Camera's are everywhere, and you can probably download a half-decent (for European scripts) OCR library for the hard work.

I sincerely hope so, as I would like my dead-wood to be as accessible as my music collection. (and to be honest, the dead wood is just gathering dust, wheras on my PDA i might actually get to re-read them in the train)

Now back to reality....

Ridiculous, contrived "copyright extremism"

[D4C5CE]

With print publishing the situation appears to be even more intractable because the new software will make it possible to make copies without even purchasing the original, he says.

Licensing agreements may be one option he says. But also people will have to learn that certain rules of conduct still apply. "It is true that this technology may cause copyright issues if it were to be used in an unorthodox way," says the NEC spokesman. But NEC would never encourage such behaviour, he adds.

According to NEC, their software is designed to sound an alarm when being used, to avoid any copyright conflicts. The company claims that any attempts to mute the device somehow or plug in headphones will not affect the audibility of this alarm. NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for three years.

A highly useful application is to be withheld from the (paying!) public for years, and then to be seriously crippled (by making annoying noise where it is most inappropriate) for the one application where it would make most sense (to avoid the inconvenient and notoriously overburdened photocopiers) as perfectly legitimate fair use: Scanning citations in a reference library.

Well, then, if commercial developers don't even want to make money (i.e. only come up with creepy copyright considerations rather than a business case) on a feature that is most useful in academia, this looks (so much rather than: sounds ;-)) like the right (scientifically challenging and quite possibly unpatentable) project to refine in the next open-source Summer of Code. Apply early, and BTW you'd "beta" have an early version ready by the start of this term. ;-/ Coming soon to a SourceForge near you I guess...

Re:crappy reporting

[A beautiful mind]

Exactly. Copyright is not a concern, copyright is the problem.

We see that technology invalidated copyright. The good reaction: we abolish copyright because it's just not feasible any more. The stupid reaction: putting our heads in the sand and pretending the problem does not exist for the sake of interests based on outdated business scheme.

Let's theorize: what would happen if we would invent a machine that is capable of replicating matter quite effectively? Would we still hold on to our precious paper money and just inflate it whenever someone prints 500 billion dollars worth and try to stop that by legislation? No, we would be stupid to do so. We would just deal away with physical money and turn to electronic more.

The situation is like that with copyright. We cannot just hold technology back because of legislation, especially such important one as communications.

Why stitching?

[MKaufmann]

My new cellphone (Sony Ericsson D750i) has a 2MP camera. That gives a resolution of about 130dpi for an A4 page. That's enough to copy pages without any stitching. In fact, since my scanner has a 40 seconds warm-up phase, I started doing photocopying with my phone. It's simply faster and the quality is good enough for me.

Japanese Tourists...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This sounds like those 60s spy movies where they would use the miniature tie-camera to take spy photos

Or the "serious" ones where they used the Minox with the focus-string to copy documents - just like the real spys did.

After WWII japanese industry at first was synonymous with cheap, shoddy, stamped-metal goods. This went on for a decade or more. But as they got their industry built back up they began to make some quality goods. One of the first things to be made in production were inexpensive cameras with high-quality optics.

Back in the '60s there was a stereotype: The crowd of Japanese tourists with cameras, photographing everything: Stop signs, park benches, flowers, door knockers, etc. The impression was that photography was a fad in Japan, fueled by the availability of the good cameras and film.

In those days industries gave tours of their facilities as a PR thing, letting anybody who wanted see how things were made: Cars, steel, plastic parts, electronic devices, cerial, you name it. Of course the ubiquitous half-busload of vacationing Japanese would take the tours.

Shortly thereafter a host of japanese industries - auto, plastic, electronic, cerial, you name it - upgraded their processes. You might think it was just the inevitable "convergent evolution" of good engineering. But an exact clone of the Rice Crispies shot tower?

Turns out that, regardless of whether the fad itself was a put-on or an honest social phenomenon, Japanese industrial spys had taken advantage of it for corporate espionage.

And very effective corporate espionage: Japan went from a producer of cheap stamped-metal toys and cheap quality cameras to an industrial powerhouse. They became the dominant producer of automobiles and consumer electronics, to name just two major industries where the US HAD been the leader. The US steel industry and much of the manufacturing that used its output, meanwhile, became the "Rust Belt".

And US companies (such as Kellogs) stopped giving the plant tours that HAD been major tourist attractions for their localities. (With the result that a couple generations in the US have now grown up with negligible understanding of the internals of industrial mass production, one factor contributing to a their profound distrust of corporations.)

Now we have had cellphones with a built-in camera as a standard component for several years (until they're deployed ubiquitously), and news of document scanner software for the cameras. Sounds to me like a similar fad and a similar opportunity.

Ok, so it makes a noise. And YOU can't disable the noise. But I'm sure that there will soon appear a hack that will disable the noise. (If nothing else, the "cute" ones that use a recorded camera shutter for pictures and whatever they pick for a scanner function will play them from a table. So make a modified firmware load with an empty table, or a hidden extra menu option to select an table entry containing silence for the prefered sound.)

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?

Or did it suddenly appear, despite the added expense, on a consumer item in a cost-sensitve, highly competitive, industry?

Dominated by manufacturers in places like Japan... B-)

Re:Japanese Tourists...

[Catbeller]

Hm. As I understood it, as it was happening, the mechanism of the success of the Japanese model was not so much how they made things, but how they treated their human assets.

Weirdly enough, it was an American (don't recall the name) labor theorist that went to Japan and impressed them with the Theory Y style of management -- teams, listening to the line workers and giving them credit, and most especially treating them like a valued member of the company instead of a liability that needed to be cost controlled at all times.

Workers at Japanese plants worked there for life. They received regular raises. They had good morale. They contributed to their companies much like they would their families, and the companies boomed.

Now, remember that the US tried the same theories out, but since the Reagan era has dismantled the whole concept and returned to a 19th century model of driving down wages, treating labor as a liability, killing the morale and, more importantly, draining the intelligent cooperation of its employees in order to make More Money.

Japan has grudgingly started to pare down its Theory Y management style, but still enough of it exists to provide a compare-and-contrast with the US screw-you-morlocks management style.

Some of you may point out they had a huge economic crash. But that was caused by overspeculation in real estate by the banking industry, not salaries for employees.

Their products seem to be more technologically innovative than ours. They have large manufacturing capabilities we've lost.

Who was right? Theory X or Y? 19th century US industrialism or 20th century Nipponese? It seems the Japanese have won. If you disagree, try and go pick up a GE cell phone.

Thas a joke. Even if one of you manages to point out a GE cell phone, the point is there should be many US manufacturers of cheap cell phones, as well as TV's, radios, iPods, whatever. Nope, off-shore tax-free manufacturing plants don't count.

Getting on slashdot

[gr8_phk]

I recently submitted a blurb to slashdot about the upcomming release of the Stix fonts and the fact that they are asking for feedback on the license right now. I was nonthreatening, so it got rejected of course. So now I'm considering a rewrite mentioning "License" in the title and some BS about YRO and copyrighting the very fonts your documents are created with. I think /. would be interested in these new fonts, and also interested in the license terms. It's unfortunate that it takes a line of fearmongering to get a story accepted these days. How about if several readers try to submit this one with various slants ;-)