Software To Flatten a Photographed Book?

davidy writes "I have photographed some pages of a book for reading on my PDA. This is much faster than scanning and I don't have to carry the heavy books. However, the photographed books are not as nice: curved, skewed, and shadowed, as opposed to the much flatter, cleaner scanned books. I have searched for software that can flatten the pages for better reading on the PDA. So far I have come across Unpaper and Scan Tailor. Unpaper doesn't seem to have a windows GUI, and Scan Tailor doesn't unskew well. I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books with a camera and a laser overlay. Is there any home user software that can do a similar job without the need for a laser overlay or other sophisticated (and patented) technology?"

Comments

Contact Scan Tailor Author?

[syousef]

At version 0.9.6, perhaps Scan Tailor is 96% of what you want and it's F/OSS. If you *politely* contact the author(s) and lay out your concerns perhaps you can get what you need AND help make a project better. Worth a try.

Look at some Google books

[frovingslosh]

I remember reading about Google's technique of converting books to e-books

My suggestion is that you look at some of the Google books that are on-line. I have, and they show the problems that you mention and more, curved pages, dark areas, and even text that is distorted and harder to read than most captchas. Whatever you have read (and yea, I remember reading it too), it doesn't seem to actually be viable in practice. Sure, photographs are easier than scanning, particularly if you do it fast and cheap, but the result is poorer. If you can scan the book without damaging them I suggest you go back and do that.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Hurricane78]

I think such a device is called a "scanner" :P

Allow me to extract the informative part of this..

[plasmacutter]

Unpaper may work for you if you're not afraid to deal with a CLI.

There's no harm in giving it a look. Assuming it's properly designed I can see it being quite elegant.

I want I want

[ethicalBob]

I want a solution to my problem that lets me be incredibly lazy, so I don't have to scan the books in (which i know will work VERY well if I just take the time to do it)...

I want software that will do it. For free.

Can I do it without a camera, too?

Actually I'd like it if there were some way I could get paid for using the software.

Can i just put my iPhone/PDA on the book and have it all sucked in via osmosis?

and then have the book read back to me w/ Morgan Freeman as the narrator?

Is there software that will turn the pages for me too? Oh wait - Morgan is going to narrate for me, that's right...

(sigh)

I know I'm probably getting modded Troll for this one; but there isn't always always an easy (magic!) software solution for every little thing. Sometimes you still have to put the work in if you want quality.

Re:I want I want

[LihTox]

It never hurts to ask; if there were an easy magic software solution to do X, wouldn't you rather find out about it now, instead of after doing X?

Re:I want I want

[Odinlake]

This guy didn't ask for 'magic' but for software to perform a conceptually simple task. He got two or three concrete examples above. There are nuttier posts on /. you can go and make fun of.

Try a heavy piece of non-glare glass

[KharmaWidow]

Try a heavy piece of non-glare glass

Re:Try a heavy piece of non-glare glass

[Anonymous Coward]

or try a flatbed scanner instead of a camera