iPhone to Scan Books

Convert page images into searchable text. Talk about software, techniques, and new developments here.

Moderator: peterZ

Post Reply
rpbrokaw
Posts: 1
Joined: 19 Jul 2016, 12:43
E-book readers owned: None
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: United States

iPhone to Scan Books

Post by rpbrokaw »

My first post here -- quite a resource.

I am interested in getting my iPhone to enable grabbing snippets from books (although I ultimately would like the whole page). I have tried many solutions. Some from the Apple app store (CamScanner, iScanner, Scanbot, Tiny Scanner) and some I created (simple iPhone app that wraps Tesseract). None of the above worked very well.

In my short playing I came across many of the challenges that you all are probably familiar with. Shadows, skew, warping, etc. I was ready to consider that the problem was not yet solved.

Then I came across a post that said Microsoft's OneNote did OCR. So I tried using the same images I used as tests with the above approaches. (For images and outputs see https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing)

I was surprised at how good the results were. Any idea what software they are using? Are there better solutions for using mobile phones to scan than the ones I tried above?

Thanks, Randy
dougo13@gmail.com
Posts: 1
Joined: 03 Sep 2016, 19:49
E-book readers owned: lots
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: Canada

Re: iPhone to Scan Books

Post by dougo13@gmail.com »

First post! Yes, I've grappled with a similar problem for the past few years. Namely, using the tablets I own like my Ipad Mini 2 and Google Nexus 2013 as cheap scanning cameras for magazine articles and book pages. The cameras can be controlled by cheap bluetooth remote switches intended for selfies but holders are a bit of a pain to find and adapt. I thought perhaps I could use the tabs in some of the book scanners but that might also be difficult depending on what kind of cameras and software are available for each device. I have to do more research on this based on info I now have from this site.

My main project is to scan in old Japanese magazines, some which are larger than normal flatbed platens. Using the methods I've seen videos of here for book scanners, they would be anything from downright impossible to challenging. Then there is the OCR issue for the Japanese and Chinese characters used throughout. Again, more thought needed BEFORE I commit to buying/building ANYTHING. Currently, I use flatbed scanners to save images from sources that range from old books to posters. Each has their own level of complexity, whether its how to scan pages that go right to the gutter or margin, to inserted items (freebies in magazines from Japan are quite common), or posters. Has anyone adapted any of the designs on this site to non destructive magazine scanning? If the mags have staples, I can always pull them out and then put them back in when the job is done. However, 99% of the mags I own are glued in. Flattening out the pages on a flatbed risks breaking the spine.

Also, I notice most people using the DIY scanners to do hard bound books. Most of what I want to do is paper bound material, so again, another challenge. I wonder if the units can be scaled DOWN instead of up for smaller sized paperbacks or hardcover books (like Big Little Books)? Hmmm...
Post Reply