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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?"
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.
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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.
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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?