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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.
Does it come with a shark-mount?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Johnny 5: Alive!
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
1) Yes, but does it run Linux.... ... the book scans you! ....
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,
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.
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 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.
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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.
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!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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).