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

Did someone say lasers?

[davidwr]

Does it come with a shark-mount?

Re:Did someone say lasers?

[Pojut]

That's an add-on, Sir. But if you act today and bump up to the "Premium" model, it comes WITH the shark-mount. Buy our "Ultimate" model, and it even comes with the frikkin' sharks!

Re:Did someone say lasers?

[kandela]

Forget the shark-mount. I have to turn my own pages!?

Oh well, I guess I'll just stick to buying books that are advertised as page turners.

Re:Did someone say lasers?

[TubeSteak]

Does it come with a shark-mount?

Warning: Do not look at shark with remaining eye.

why make it smaller?

[Michael Kristopeit]

we just need a few at libraries to digitize everything for everyone... no need to make it any smaller.

Copyright

[Logical Zebra]

Oh, my, isn't this going to be a huge copyright scandal in a few years? I could walk into Borders, scan a few books onto my iPhone, and walk right out without paying.

Re:Copyright

[bb5ch39t]

You're absolutely correct! The researchers need to immediately be jailed for contributing to copyright violations. Scientists! They never think about how their inventions will impact our Corporate Overlords.

Re:Copyright

[Darkness404]

I know! Can you believe that even now you can go into Borders or Barnes and Nobel and -read- an entire book! And guess what? The employees there think its perfectly natural! There was a man there who said he had spent -3- hours just reading a book and drinking coffee! Talk about outrageous!

Prior Art.

[0100010001010011]

Johnny 5: Alive!

Re:Prior Art.

[necro81]

Damn! I had mod points this morning.

Re:Prior Art.

[Hurricane78]

Need input! Input, input, input!

Re:Prior Art.

[bughunter]

Does no one here read Vernor Vinge?

(Spoilerish bit follows. Only a spoiler for the worst of purists, but they have been warned.)

Rainbow's End has an act where an virtual book cartel deploys a giant vacuum/shredder/optical scanner to the UCSD Geisel Library. It sucks in books a shelf at a time, feeds them thru a wood chipper, and the shreds pass thru a tunnel lined with optical scanners. A photo is taken of each bit, and software reconstructs the books.

Needless to say, this idea displeases many people, and the climax of the novel takes place as the bibliovorous machine threatens the library.

(End spoilerish bit.)

Rainbow's End should be on Slashdot's list of top 10 reads. I'm surprised it hasn't spawned a half dozen cliches here, e.g., belief circles and Scooch-a-mouts.

High Speed Camera

[bhima]

The project uses a high speed camera... so if a camera from a handy is going to be used, they are going to have to get a lot better.

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.

Faster method

[vlm]

Faster method:

Cut the spine of the book off with a bandsaw with a metal cutting blade (finer pitch teeth than typical wood blade)

Run thru sheet feeder scanner twice, once for each side.

A bit of scripting hackery later, one fresh PDF! Or .djvu, or whatever.

For those of us brought up that its sacrilegious to damage a book, realize that many books were printed on acid paper; yellowing, decaying, brittle, and will soon be dust regardless of what you do, so may as well preserve the content and properly recycle the pulp.

The bandsaw trick also works on magazines, you know, the things we used to read before websites.

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:Faster method

[necro81]

Cutting the spine off a book you already own may or may not be sacrilege. But doing that to your friend's book might strain your relationship.

The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.

Re:Faster method

[vlm]

The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.

Someone with real balls would have asked for a cash refund. "Clearly my copy of the book is faulty, can I get cash refund, or just instore credit?"

(just kidding)

Re:Faster method

[vlm]

First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages.

My bandsaw does no damage to the pages either. Clearly you haven't tried this. It worked for me, but I'm a small timer compared to the guys at bitsavers.org. They claim it works on an EXTREMELY large scale. I "saw" an ad for a paper shear (usually used for binding, and sorry for the pun). The shear was about 10 times the cost of my little tabletop bandsaw. If the market has changed and you can now buy a shear for the cost of a good steak dinner, well, I guess I'm out of date then. But even then, I needed a bandsaw for other purposes, and if its dual use, all the better, and I'd not be amused at buying, storing, maintaining, and evnetually disposing of two tools to do a job that one does perfectly well.

Second, nearly all the high-speed sheet-fed document scanners out there are duplex scanners.

New, maybe. Not in the olden times aka longer ago than yesterday. Maybe the new ones even duplex properly with paper other than standard 8.5x11 laser paper, and don't just jam on the cut edge. Maybe the new ones don't duplex at a speed about 4 times slower than non-duplex. You're the expert, I'm merely a guy who's actually done it.

I'm only saying what worked with what I had, and what I know other people have successfully done in the past, I'm not just some dude quoting specs out of a tiger direct catalog with an infinite budget for brand new gadgets.

Re:Faster method

[Mista2]

I just place my kindle on my scanner, hit scan, then next page. Rinse and repeat. 10 minutes later I have the book ripped. Then a little OCR work converts to text. this still takes a little time though as I'd have to proof read afterwards as well. Once I've done a few, I'll look at finding out how to re encode as a .mobi file.

Here we go...

[trurl7]

1) Yes, but does it run Linux....
2) Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
3) I can't understand 200 pages/minute, what's that in LOC/furlough?
4) I can't read you insensitive clod.
5) In Soviet Russia, the book scans the book scanner...wait that's not quite right...ah, got it, ... the book scans you!
6.1) Scan books real fast
6.2) Tie into massive database that indexes every perceivable medium on the planet
6.3) Get sued by publishers.
6.4) ....
6.5) Profit!!
7) How fast can it build a 3d model of Natalie Portman with hot gritz?
8) The CIA will use this to scan every page of the manuscripts you've stored in your apartment and will come for your tin foil.
9) Netcraft confirms: reading is dying...
10) A book scanner is like a car that drives really fast over a highway full of book pages...

Someone needs to fix the above list for me.

Rainbows End?

[snikulin]

Now if they also will learn to shred the books in the process and sell the technology to Google, then I will really respect Vernor Vinge's insight (Rainbows End)

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:This is Masatoshi Ishikawa

[Digana]

I want to hear you had to go to the hospital for an emergency maxilofacial reconstruction.

Re:This is Masatoshi Ishikawa

[Anonymous Coward]

High-speed robot hand... from Japan.

No comment.

Bender did it first

[slimjim8094]

There was an episode of Futurama where Bender is captaining the ship, and Fry asks him if he's read the manual. Bender flips through the several-hundred-page book in about a half second and proclaims "Done", then proceeds to quote it.

It always seemed like a plausible thing to me. Isn't that what they're doing here?

I'm not impressed

[Locke2005]

Sure, it can scan 200 pages per minute... but I could swear I saw it's lips moving as it was reading!

Publishing industry will follow the music industry

[hawguy]

Technology like this will cause the publishing industry to go the way of the music and movie industries.

Right now the publishing industry is where the music industry was 7 years ago. Multiple incompatible book formats, DRM that lets rights holders yank your paid content away from you, DRM/formats that leave you tied to specific vendor readers, etc.

The barrier of scanning a book has made the publishing industry think that they don't need to provide books in a format that users want and feel that they can keep books locked down by DRM.

Even if DRM succeeds in keeping e-books from being redistributed, scanning technology keeps moving forward. All it's going to take is some enterprising company to buy one of these scanners and become the "AllofMP3" of the book world -- selling e-books in open, non-DRM formats for $1/each and the publisher's business model will fail miserably and they'll try doing the same catch-up that the music industry is involved in in trying to give users a reasonably priced legal product that can compete with the cheap illegal copies.

it won't even take new scanning technology for this to happen -- a scanning "peer-to-peer" service can be formed where thousands of subscribers are asked to scan and proofread a single page from new releases, which are them compiled into a central database to form a complete scanned book archive.

Whether they like it or not, the book industry is going to be forced into open, interoperable standards for books, and lower prices that consumers have come to expect from industries where nearly all of the manufacturing and distribution costs have been eliminated by electronic distribution.

Why are we scanning books

[pclminion]

Why the fuck are we scanning books? Isn't there, you know, a DIGITAL REPRESENTATION which is used during typesetting? This reminds me of that crazy story of the person who printed out a spreadsheet, scanned it in, printed out the scan, laid it on a wooden table, took a digital picture of it, then uploaded it to his web site (or something like that).

Re:Why are we scanning books

[hawguy]

There are many (most?) books published before computer aided writing and typesetting became the norm. Even for many books that were published electronically, the electronic files used to create the books may not exist or may be unreadable due to poor archiving, publisher is out of business, hard to parse proprietary file formats, archaic hardware (cobbling together a punched tape reader from the 70's might be harder and more trouble-prone than just scanning the book), etc.

And then there are the non-technical issues like when publishers don't really want to cooperate (i.e. Google Books).

Re:Why are we scanning books

[hawguy]

There were around 400,000 books published in the 70's alone reference. Most of these books are not rare, nor would they be fragile enough to be significantly damaged by a high speed scanner. And I'd be willing to bet that most of them do not have electronic publishing files.

Some high speed scanners (like Google's) are designed to cause no more harm to a book than a person reading it.

This begs a deeper question

[zappepcs]

When established industries become prey for new technology, why do they resist and ask for protection? This is a fundamental question of society. We protect indigenous peoples. We have copyright and patents. We do much to preserve the old along with the new - backwards compatibility. Why do we not simply tell such industries that it's time to change and support them through the change? Yes, I get the whole free market thing, but rather than fight them to force them to accept change, why don't we offer them ideas and methods to change their business model to match the change in consumer requirements?

No, I'm not being trollish or suggesting stupidity. Why can't we crowd-source ideas for how these industries can recover from game changing technology? Must we wait for Jobs to tell us?

It's just a question.