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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?"
Snapter is a bit cumbersome but that's what it does.
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Get a thick, heavy piece of glass and lay it atop the pages to flatten them out before you photograph them. Use ambient light and avoid the flash.
Aye, this Ask Slashdot sounds more like "Doctor, it hurts whenever I do this." The traditional response to such nonsense is, "well, then don't do that!"
Next question?
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Not everyone has 5-10mm thick peices of book sized glass lying around and it can be hard to take that sort of thing about the place in case of requiring to photo a book.
There is software called Book restorer that does this removes curves 'geometrical correction' etc but it's pricy.
i've tried un paper and it's pretty decent for what it does but it does have some limitations and it's not the most convenient to use.
Deskewing, cropping, filling, etc etc are all easily done and I've even written imagemagick batch scripts in windows to do these things. The major trick is the curve removal.
There's various ways you can determine the curve from a scanned image. If you have the edge of the page, you can calculate the movement required to straighten that, and then apply it to the whole image. You can use text based curve removal, similar to well known deskew algorithms for text, but takes into account different parts of the text may be 'more' skewed. i.e. rather than a rotational deskew a 'sliced' deskew. This needs to be done from the top to the middle and the bottom to the middle.
If you have a good 'shape' of the page, and know the true size of the page, you can use a kind of morph operator to morph the corners back to th eright position and hope the image follows.
Using a Greyscale/colour source will work better than a black and white source image in general.
the other option is if the scanned / photoed page is actually of reasonaly good quality but if just a bit squint, then OCR it to a PDF and generate a new document using the OCR text, which will be pin sharp accurate, compress a lot better and be easier to use, although may not be ideal if there are too many errors.
He can easily get his tiny 10 megapixels camera into the book store, but he would be stopped immediately if he tried to bring his scanner instead.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Digital cameras from Casio (Exilim serie) have a dedicated to take picture of sheets of paper, whiteboards and visit cards. It detects the content boundaries, crops and unskew it. You could also save time (and money since time = money) by looking for and buying the electronic version of the book you want to read.
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If you have ~$300 to drop on the project, Make has plans for a nice book scanner: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/04/how-to_book_scanner_on_the_cheap.html It seems to hold the pages at an angle so there's little-to-no distortion on the page.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/tutorials/scans/en.shtml Here's a tutorial to stitch scans together the slight curve of the page is minimized where the scan joins. Might be what you are looking for.
Cut the spine off and run the pages through a scanner's page feeder... OCR if desired, then enjoy...
I'm surprised that Google doesn't do this, it would be SO much faster than scanning each page one at a time.
Yeah, I don't see why they don't just slice the spine off that one-of-a-kind 16th century book so they can scan it in. That's such an easier way to do it. And I have NO idea why a library would have an issue with that.
Are people around here really this dumb?
This might be what you're after
You're welcome.
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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Some guy posted a great instructables on building your own high speed book scanner, purposely designed to rapidly photograph book pages without curves. He even includes a software stream that OCRs the contents and sticks them into PDFs.
It's been quite popular -- so much so that he's created an online forum at http://www.diybookscanner.org/ dedicated to discussions from DIY book scanners all over the place, where they talk about builds, parts, and software.
I've been very tempted to build one myself just to avoid carrying heavy books around in my backpack.
John
Really, if you are doing this for yourself and have no intention of selling your product, then you are free to use their method all you want.
35 U.S.C. 271 (a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
Yes, it's extremely unlikely that anyone would ever sue you for infringing a patent in the privacy of your own home because the damages would be minuscule and it would be very difficult to prove infringement, but it's still an infringement.
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.
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
Try a heavy piece of non-glare glass
I went out and got one of the Planon Pen Scanners. Depending on what you want, they can go all the way to 600 dpi in color. Check out their web site. You can also get bargains on refurbished earlier models if you only need B&W and up to 200 dpi. http://www.planonstore.com/SearchResults.asp
No need. At a quick glance, Scan Tailor is programmed in QT3 (a superset of C++, used by KDE). This is a multi-platform environment, making it very easy to fix something on all supported platforms at once. If unskew doesn't work well, then that should be addressed in both versions. Fixing the Linux version will fix the Windows version too (unless he's relying on platform specific libraries in addition to QT).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Basically you look up the internal command names such as file-jpeg-save and what arguments it takes then program either a plugin for gimp or a non interactive script. You can do it in scheme which they refer to as script-fu, or you can write them in python and it's called python-fu. The former is lightly documented and the latter barely at all. The only way I've found to look up all the command names for the python interface is to run gimp, then go to filters -> python-fu -> console then hit the browse button. But yeah basically it's either learn to program in scheme or python at this point.