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How Google's High Speed Book Scanner De-Warps Pages
Hugh Pickens writes "Patent 7,508,978, awarded to Google, shows how the company has already managed to scan more than 7 million books. Google's system uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then 'de-warping' it afterward, Google can present flat-looking pages online without having to slice books up or mash them onto a flatbed scanner. Stephen Shankland writes that the 'sophistication of the technology illustrates that would-be competitors who want to feature their own digitized libraries won't have a trivial time catching up to Google.' First, a book is placed on a flat surface, while above it, an infrared projector displays a special mazelike pattern onto the pages. Next, two infrared cameras photograph the infrared pattern from different perspectives. 'The images can be stereoscopically combined, using known stereoscopic techniques, to obtain a three-dimensional mapping of the pattern,' according to the patent. 'The pattern falls on the surface of (the) book, causing the three-dimensional mapping of the pattern to correspond to the three-dimensional surface of the page of the book.'"
but to be honest this is at least worthy patent
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
they could probably do it in the visible spectrum as well, it would just take twice as long because they can't map and scan at the same time.
Failing that there are alternative methods that might work as well.
Collector's Edition
I don't see why this is such a showstopper for other book scanning projects. Right off the top of my head I can think of three methods of dewarping book scans that have nothing do to with Google's methods. While Google's method is definitely quite interesting and seems like a great solution, it is by no means whatsoever the only way of accomplishing this.