Minimal equipment iPhone-based scanning

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phulin
Posts: 2
Joined: 21 Aug 2018, 10:50
Number of books owned: 0
Country: United States

Minimal equipment iPhone-based scanning

Post by phulin »

Hi all,

I'm working on an iPhone-based scanning platform, mainly targeted at textbooks. The eventual idea is that you'll be able to scan books with just a phone and a car-style phone mount, with motion detection as you flip the pages. Of course, this means no platen, and so dewarping will have to be done in software somehow. For now, I've been working on a Python implementation of the text-line-based 2015 Kim/Koo/Cho paper which has the best current performance. I have that a bunch of other scan-related tools on my github, https://github.com/phulin/rebook. Theoretically, the dewarping should soon be much easier: the new iPhones (currently X/7+/8+) have a depth camera, which unfortunately I can't test as I don't have one.

My rudimentary app detects motion and takes pictures, but doesn't do any post-processing. Because there's no platen and no trigger, it can reach very high speeds - I've been getting ~2000 pph when taking photos of dual-page spreads.It saves the images to a zip file which you can then airdrop or otherwise transfer to a computer to run the python stuff. If you'd like to beta test the current app, send me a PM with your Apple account email. Sorry, no Android for now

This is all pretty rough - especially the python stuff - so you'll probably need some amount of expertise to work around the kinks.

Here are some example images:
Original: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fuux4mv8r11vy ... t.png?dl=0
Dewarped: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bcaf4a1k8qxkq ... 0.png?dl=0
phulin
Posts: 2
Joined: 21 Aug 2018, 10:50
Number of books owned: 0
Country: United States

Re: Minimal equipment iPhone-based scanning

Post by phulin »

Oh, and if you need a copy of the Kim/Koo/Choo paper, feel free to PM me.
kallax
Posts: 1
Joined: 02 Dec 2019, 13:37
Number of books owned: 6
Country: Germany

Re: Minimal equipment iPhone-based scanning

Post by kallax »

If you're using an iphone, then that has 240FPS camera and depth camera. Would it be possible to do something like the Japanese page flipping scanner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo), so you just scroll through the book a few times and it then puts the pieces together?

It would be a lot of work and the quality probably wouldn't be very good, but as long as it's readable scanning a book in 30 seconds without equipment would have a lot of use.
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