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Google's Book Scanning Technology Revealed
blee37 writes "Last March we discussed Google's patent for a rapid book scanning system. This article describes and provides pictures of how the system works in practice. Google is secretive, but the system's inner workings were apparently divulged by University of Tokyo researchers who wrote a research article on essentially identical technology. There are also videos of robotic page flippers and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages."
Can RTFA for me
Nullius in verba
I often wondered if it would be possible for a book to be scanned while closed, using some kind of MRI technology that digitally sliced the book page by page, picking up on the density difference between the ink and the paper slice by slice.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Sea Shanties were sung in association with ship-board tasks (often repetitious in nature). Is Google paving the way for the Librarian chantey?
human type book into PC, machine print book on paper, machine binds book ---time goes by--- machine unbind book, robot and human flip pages of book, machine photograph book, machine put book on PC.
Simply set up a rig with 2 digital cameras and a plexiglass V to photograph 2 pages at a time. It's quite fast and cheap.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/
Works great. I built one to turn a couple of rare automotive books into PDF so I dont damage a $180.00 book in the garage.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Google is secretive, but the system's inner workings were apparently divulged by University of Tokyo researchers
Surely the whole point of the patent system is to grant exclusive use for a period in return for publishing full details of how whatever it is works? How can you have a patent without divulging the crucial information?
...and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages.
...you will know it is time to turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bells like this...
Yaz.
Back when we called them "Service Bureaus" book scanning was fast, easy, and cheap, as long as you didn't want the book back.
You deliver your book, magazine, phone book, map, large format document, or whatever to a Service Bureau.
They will then use a paper saw and cut the binding off and the other three sides to make perfectly smooth edges.
Then they put the whole mess into a hopper. The hopper feeds the pages to a scanner.
When it's done, flip the pile over and put it back into the hopper to get the odd-numbered pages into the scanner.
What you get back is your original book (as a pile of pages with no binding) and a CD-ROM of its contents in both original TIFF and OCRd text files. Now you can get them as PDF/A and DejaVu formats.
I suppose Google's point is that they don't want to ruin the books, or maybe they are so proud of their 3D-scanner enough to use it at all costs. But think of this: there are usually several thousands, perhaps millions, of copies of the books I've seen in Google's library, so destroying one copy of the book seems fair enough.
Kriston
Elegant, hypnotic, and not what google uses. Google scans the books, lying flat. It projects a grid-like pattern over the pages in IR, photographs up the distorted image using 3D cameras, and recreates a 3D model of the book, and uses that model to undistort the pages. It uses human slaves to turn the pages, since robots aren't as gentle.
The link isn't slashdotted anymore