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

How about a $300 home-built scanner?

[plover]

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.