Computer hardware (cpu, gpu) to support software?

[bsbob]

I've got the two cameras already. Never got around to building my pvc book scanner. I did take pics of a book though and ended up with several hundred pics. Those are left and right pages. Still are. I took the pics and used some software I found on here (most likely yasw. I found a log file from that.) The other program may have been Scan Tailor but that doesn't sound as familiar.

What I remember when I put the images in the software and ran it was that my computer was pegged for processing. (maybe the original image sizes were too larger though...)

But I'm buying a new computer. So I thought of my book scanner project.

Any advice on the cpu or graphics card especially? I mentioned image work to someone and they said to get a cpu/mobo that supports more cores. More cores being better than "less cores but faster speed."

And then I'm wondering if the graphics card helps at all with this type of image processing. If it's software crunching image data, does that use the graphics card? ie Is it worth bumping up the graphics card a bit to handle book scan image processing?

I can dig out the exact chip and graphics cards I'm looking at.

I'm also thinking it might not matter. A duo core computer probably struggles with something a new i7 will have no trouble with.

[bsbob]

I found my post.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... 2&start=40

So I was using YASW. That made my current/old computer run hard though for a while and then it never actually made me a result.

I imagine any modern computer would be better compared to one that's over five years old now. I'm not sure would shift my computer purchase just for book scanning but it's one element to consider when buying a new computer.

[bsbob]

Interesting. I even found my yasw folder with the exe and my test mentioned in the other post. I've got an 86 page PDF of "white squares in the middle" of the PDF view in Reader. I took a chapter of a book and tried to get left and right pages to be put together.

[duerig]

One tricky thing is that a lot of the software that is out there now is not necessarily smart enough to take advantage of the GPU or multiple CPUs. For example, the last time I was using ScanTailor, it was still completely single-threaded. I ended up processing four books at once with four instances of the program to try to take full advantage of my CPU. I know that some people have made modifications to try to multi-thread it. But I am not sure whether those got into the main build.

So I think you should just get the laptop you want and not worry too much about maximizing the possibility of processing scans.

-D

[Tulon]

The official version of Scan Tailor is indeed single-threaded, but that's because no one updated it since 2012.
Scan Tailor Experimental (get it from here) is multi-threaded and supports GPU acceleration via OpenCL. On the other hand, there is no project file portability between ST Exp and official version.

[duerig]

That is awesome, Tulon! I haven't had a chance to try the experimental ST yet. I am still on the 'official' build. I knew you were making a bunch of improvements, but didn't realize that these were among them.

-D