Japanese Researchers Develop World's Fastest Book Scanner

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone." The article mentions Google's similar dewarping system; the difference here is speed.

Comments

This is Masatoshi Ishikawa

[AdmiralXyz]

This guy has produced some really fascinating work, I strongly recommend checking out some more of it if you have some free time. The high-speed robot hand he developed literally made my jaw drop.

Re:Faster method

[sribe]

How the heck did this get scored insightful??? Seriously?

First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages. Second, nearly all the high-speed sheet-fed document scanners out there are duplex scanners. In the case where the owner is willing to cut the binding off the book, there are well-known equipment and well-established techniques that do not involve rubes with bandsaws and script hackery.

Re:High Speed Camera

[Hurricane78]

By the way: “handy” is not used as a term for a mobile phone aka cell phone in the English language.
I know it’s used in Germany, and people from there are prone to mess it up, because it’s a foreign English word in the German language.