New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

DIY Book Scanner Skunk Works. Share your crazy ideas and novel approaches. Home of the "3D structure of a book" thread.

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duerig
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by duerig »

aku, it looks like the Czur scanner is finally shipping and we can see some videos of people actually using it as opposed to promotional hype. Take a look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTT7ai8GyzM

So it looks like some things were over-hyped (speed, overall quality). But other things are better than I had thought. It uses lasers to detect the shape of the book similar to my laser scanner prototype. Which means that it won't get confused by pages with art or maps or other not-quite-standard content. Overall, this looks like a better value than the ScanSnaps and once you get going with it, it will likely give more consistent results.

-D
aku
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by aku »

Thanks. Bookmarked for the evening.
aku
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by aku »

I should possibly ask, can you tell us where you found the link ?
I am watching the teleread site where I found Czur first, and did not see anything there yet.
aku
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by aku »

Assiociated YT channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFcbrx ... jDDH6NAd0w.
Googling for the name + "czur" I further find http://www.johnwillis.com/.
A large series of posts.
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jwillis84
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by jwillis84 »

Yeah those videos would be by me.

The scanner is nice, but the software has some growing pains to go through. The software development looks stalled while they focus on assembly and shipping. They were making two models, a black and a white. The black models were produced first and they were getting those in the hands of their supporters. They ran into a problem when they shipped US power adapters by default to European supporters, and took some time to correct that issue. The white models are next up and they are trying to finish shipping those.

The electronic seems to be based on the SPCA6330A from SunPlus or the spin off company iCatch, which is a really sophisticated SoC normally used in Action cameras. It has a lot of options and they included a Wi-Fi module in the Czur design, which means there is a lot of potential for making it wireless in many ways.

The default scan mode is Wi-Fi to a cloud storage location, for now only to Czurtek servers. But they said in the comments they are looking at widening that to personal Dropbox, GDrive and Evernote accounts.

Not a lot of docs available.. hopefully that will be coming, but the SPCA6330A states it can complete a capture in 63 milliseconds, and is specially tailored for low light and low noise ISO6400.. the sensor array will factor into that.

The current PC software is for Windows only, which will work over a USB 2.0 connection. It uses the OpenCV image manipulation library, and that had 2D and 3D transforms. So I am guessing that is what they are using. The provided OCR is based on AbbyFine reader.

The USB bus detects the scanner as a UVC 1.0 device, the descriptors "tell" a generic Windows device driver it has both Video and Still Image capture capabilities. The difference is Video is at high, but lower resolution than Still Images which can be much higher.

I keep digging for more information about it, but the makers seem really eager to make good on upgrading the software and releasing more details in the future. -- its a niche market, but one they could really capture if they try, the Action Cam market is subsiding, 3D Action Cam is languishing on Google and Facebook. -- and no one has really come out with the definitive "Best" eDocument or eBook all in one software yet.

As a webcam, or presentation overhead scanner it works really well on Windows, Linux and Mac.. no special software required, just use whatever you got and aim it at the USB camera. As a still cam, its a little more challenging, all three operating systems don't really decode the USB descriptors "well" or even acknowledge the benefits of using a super-hi-res Image capture mode -- again "lack of" imagination on the USB driver writers to fully support Still Image capture as a useful feature.

De-warping a 2D or 3D surface based on baseline information (Laser guides) also isn't well supported in a GUI tool yet, the libraries support it (OpenCV) but no one has really connected the dots together well.

VLC also work with it well.. but again, VLC doesn't have a good de-warping implementaion, its wanted all over the place, for planetariums, image correction and editing.. but no one writing the software seems to "see the need" at the moment.

A side thought for a moment.. OpenCV has both a GUI subsystem and an Image Capture function.. I would assume to minimize the impedance between using other libraries for capture and display. It also has Python bindings as well as C/C++ bindings.. so I'm starting to think Czur went that route for the actual capture methods they used and fell back on Microsoft Directshow libraries for the Live display.. I'm just not sure how. Once you start doing something with Isynchronous USB transfers, and then need to let another thread take over for Still Image capture the hand off has to be coordinated.. I'm not sure how. I base this on observing they included runtime libraries from Microsoft that support the kernel streaming device driver for a/v although that might just be the method that OpenCV uses.. I am woefully inexperienced to know for sure.. its mostly just guesswork on my part.

For now they are dumping individual page snaps into the file system as single pictures. I wish they would not, because carrying a folder full of images around is asking for disaster.. I'd prefer a composite TIFF file or a PDF file with all of the images bound into a lossless bundle until they are finally OCr'd and published as a set in a final document.
-- Never mistake a Clear path for a Short run --
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jwillis84
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by jwillis84 »

TeraHertz 3D closed book scanner.

So ironic.. I was thinking of this last year.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/0 ... osed-books
-- Never mistake a Clear path for a Short run --
cday
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by cday »

Yes, a very interesting concept, but it could be a while I think before anyone posts their design for a practical version on the forum!

Imagine if something similar could be developed to read people's thoughts: very useful in security and criminology!
duerig
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by duerig »

That is a really neat article. I doubt it would ever yield high enough quality (or low enough cost) to be a DIY project for normal books. But what is exciting is professionals using it to scan books and scrolls that cannot be read any other way. There are so many ancient works that are lost. But perhaps we have copies still around that we can't read because the book is too fragile to open, or there are palimpsests with the original rubbed out and a new work written over it.

The idea of a truth scanner sounds pretty dystopic, though. :)

-D
L.Willms
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by L.Willms »

From Germany ...

a very professional offering from a company based near Frankfurt, where it took me to live: http://microbox.de/en/
I found that thru the regional TV program reporting that representatives of this company are accompanying the German minister for econmic affairs, Gabriel, on his recent trip to Iran.

The DIY project using just old items found in the builder's house, with "book above, camera below", with just 1 camera swinging on a pendulum. A series of articles from the magazin "Make" published by Heise:
http://www.heise.de/make/artikel/Buchsc ... 60162.html
German language only... On the basis of his experiences, the author made an improved model presented in the second article.

Stumbling by accident over this article pushed me to search for more and discovering this excellent forum.

I hope this post is not misplaced in this thread...
peterZ
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Re: New Scanner Tech Watch Thread

Post by peterZ »

More info about Czur scanner here . i did not see this link in the above discussion ....

http://us2.metamath.org:443/other/czur/ ... anner.html
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