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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.'"
Does it run on Linux? Does it work for scanning porn?
I wonder how ass curvature comes out with that scanner.
do NOT sit on the copier machine with pants down at google hq
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
When is the patent office going to quit giving patents for obvious techniques? :)
How long before some particularly vengeful luddite publisher starts printing on treated paper stock that has an IR visible pattern, calculated to confuse these scanners, printed on it?
They've been making "anti-copy paper" designed to defeat optical scanning for years now, surely something similar in the IR band could be effected...
Wasn't this a Sci-Fi movie staple back in the 80s? They used it for body and object scanning, not books...but still.
I've read many comments over the years about the old Bell Labs and how a huge amount of pioneering research came out of them over the course of their existance, i.e. before they got axed.
It would seem that Google Labs is performing somewhat the same function, albeit more oriented towards software rather than physical research.
May the Maths Be with you!
...who's flipping the pages?
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
The technique is old, many years old. What is google's patent for? The use of a decades-old technique ON BOOKS?
...that Google licenses this to scanner manufacturers and we see this at a consumer level at some point in the future? I know I'd pay good money for a book scanner that doesn't need to have a 'book edge' (which you already have to pay through the nose for)...
That's cool and all that, but who (or what) flips the pages?
Interns.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Imagine what this technology could do for coworkers who like to photocopy their butts!
Pages lie different from the front to the back of the book, and books are bound differently. So you can't use a generic model and expect it to be accurate in most cases.
I actually think this is really cool because it seems to account for any scenario, including folded pages, I would assume. Although, I suppose that in extreme bends it might not be perfect, but certainly they just need to ensure that pages are adequately flat. It automates the entire process.
I wonder if they've built an automated page-turning mechanism; I would assume they have. Just drop in a book and let the machine go to town on it.
Ok, is it just me, but wouldn't it be easier to just cut the spine off the book instead of developing a whole new way of scanning it?
With 7 million books, the manpower and time saved for them to cut the spine off would be worth it.
Also, they can resell the books if needed or give them charity after they are done.
Kind of would be a waste of a paper to tear that many books apart.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Obviously it was worthy enough to be issued; but I don't know how worthy it is in the broader sense.
Notably, for instance, there has been a fair bit of interest, for some years, in using digital cameras in concert with projectors, either for automatic keystone/distortion correction, for projectors that aren't perfectly aligned with the projection surface, or for automatic coordination of multiple projectors illuminating the same surface, without laborious manual tiling adjustment. This is, in essence, an equivalent problem(inferring a surface's geometry based on pictures of a known image projected upon it).
The IEEE has held "Projector-Camera systems" workshops since 2003, and somebody was obviously working on it before that. I'm not saying that Google's patent falls into asshole troll territory or anything; but the notion of doing surface geometry inference based on known image projection isn't nearly as novel as it might seem.
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.
Only if Google refused to license it. Google isn't Microsoft or Intel; I doubt they'd go that route.
In fact, since Google has paid for the innovation of this tech, including the R&D for it, patenting it and then allowing companies to license it reduces the barrier since companies that couldn't have paid for the research now have the technique available to them.
This may be a projector thing, but they are doing something of physical manipulation. It would be pretty much appropriate to be patented. The whole thing is physically transformative. Meanwhile, if someone made their own version using something different, it too, would be patentable/improvement patent, which is how the patent system is supposed to work.
To be clear, I'm saying the system as a whole should be patentable (infrared), but not the software used to decode it.
That's modded funny, but take a look at this.
Maybe they use automated page turning machines for normal books, and turn pages by hand for older/more fragile works?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
There are scanners that flip pages themselves like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyB5c3S4vzc&feature=related but I've seen somewhere (can't remember where though) a video of a scanner that was faster and didn't use vacuum to flip pages. It was quite a lot less noisy.
Word.
I was involved in evaluating rare books back around the turn of the century.
I can personally attest that representatives of online book search companies were attempting to buy up one of a kind pieces for destructive scanning.
There was one dealer in possession of a somewhat flawed, but well examined Shakespeare folio that had to put the kabosh on a reputation making deal because he found out the buyer was going to slice the piece out of its binding for scanning.
I turned down a much smaller offer on a much less significant, but still very cool, two hundred year old angler's guide (with hand colored plates and original binding) for the same reason.
Quality scans without destruction can only help raise the profile of rare books and the value they offer society - not simply for their content, but as tangible examples of the evolution of the art of communication.
This is useful and interesting, but doesn't seem particularly novel.
Projecting a known pattern onto a surface or using multiple cameras to determine the shape of a surface have been around for quite a while, so adding it to an OCR system doesn't seem like a big deal.
I really don't think the libraries that Google was scanning at would have appreciated that too much..
Totally off topic here but I'll risk it.
It really bothers me that neither Rock Band nor Guitar Hero can auto-calibrate the audio lag using the microphone. There's absolutely no reason I can see that they can't "listen" for the calibration beeps with the mic to get a perfect reading.
Google is mostly scanning books borrowed from university libraries. Librarians get cranky if you borrow a book and return a stack of loose sheets of paper.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Cough, you don't ahve to. I can copy your book all gad damn day long and have not violated your rights or the copyright code.
The moment I try to distribute them, then it's a copyright violation.
It's called copyright, because the only reason one would copy it was to distribute it.
Backup really wasn't an issue then like it is now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
De-warping sounds useful, but there are problems that it probably won't solve --
Like the operator who scans a book page with his/her fingers or hand stuck between the page and the scanner-glass. For example, the dreaded 'New York Hand' or its fingers can be seen occupying the place of part of the text or figures on many pages of books scanned for Google-Books from the New York Public Library. On some pages, the impression of the fingers is clear enough to show the rings worn by the Hand that was doing the scanning. :(
It will take more than a de-warping patent to solve that one .....
-wb-
This is actually what I envisioned for a book scanner, years ago.
But unlike Google, I...
1) Never built it.
2) Am not facing lawsuits from overzealous sue-happy publishers.
Seems like a good defensive patent to have.
This is another one.
http://www.treventus.com/index_en.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOQuuLYavY
This is way better than my idea, which was to throw the book into a wood chipper, scan the results, and then algorithmically reassemble them...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
This trick has been used for 20 years in astronomy. You shine a really powerful laser of known metrics into the sky and measure the atmospheric distortion suffered by the beam.
Then you take those numbers and calculate what it would take to even out the beam, and you feed THAT set of numbers to a telescope with adaptive optics which will then correct for the atmospheric distortion. Bingo, suddenly your telescope is able to take sharp images without having the air screw it up.
The technique is very effective and results in ground-based telescopes that rival anything the Hubble can do. Plus they are easier to fix.
I want to say this is called Guidestar but I am not sure.
Anyway the similarity to Google's process is simply that you shine a light or image of known value on something unknown and look at how the image now deviates from what you expect. A little math and suddenly you know exactly the shape of the unknown object. Brilliant.
Really? Structured light to find 3D geometry is old hat ... the optical and signal processing part of book scanning seem pretty easy, making the mechanical part for page flipping robust seems a lot harder to me.
Be sure to check out the exclusive rights in copyrighted works before making blanket assertions on what is and is not legal under copyright law. The exclusive rights granted by copyright include both reproduction and distribution. There are lots of exceptions to these exclusive rights, but an interpretation that completely eviscerates the exclusive right to reproduce a work is not supported by the Copyright Act.
If you were a rare book expert during the turn of the century, why isn't your slashdot ID smaller?
;
It's simply called adaptive optics (AO). In AO, a guidestar is a natural isolated point-like star that is close to your science object (what you are trying to look at). If a laser is used to excite the sodium layer to create an artificial reference, it's called a "laser guidestar".
Anyway, this "trick" is completely different from adaptive optics in both the mathematics and implementation.
Google should return to the open source community a decent OCR app+engine. Tesserac+ocropus are just too little, and it's already too late.
Windows already has decent ocr habilities, any hp scanner comes with decent image to page-document sofware. It's a shame that google, that has been build upon open source and has maybe the best ocr technology in the world, hasn't returned a competitive and free ocr solution for Linux.
What's in a sig?
I think OP meant the book was 200 years old.
Of course if OP is over 200 years old, we'd have to ask: What the heck is he doing fishing all the time??