3 - Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

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Superfast Book Scanner
[#] E. Guizzol, "Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages" IEEE Spectrum, spectrum.ieee.org, March 7, 2010. [Online]. Available: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/book-flipping-scanning. [Accessed: March 13, 2010].

Masotoshi Ishikawa is a brilliant professor at the University of Tokyo. Perhaps you've heard of him or seen his incredible work -- he's the man behind the robotic hand that can dribble a basketball and catch objects in midair better than most humans can. Well, Professor Isikawa has recently developed a way to scan a book with lightning-quick speed.

Conventional methods of book-scanning are still limited by how fast human hands can correctly position a book in front of an image-capturing system. Ishikawa's lab researchers, Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, have developed the hardware for the system, and the three claim they can digitize a 200-page book in, astonishingly enough, one minute.

The camera that takes the pictures of the pages in the book operates at a super-fast 500 grams per second, and captures images at high resolution -- 1280 x 1024 pixels. The scanned pages, when first acquired, are curved and distorted, just like the pages are in any book, but the team devised a way to remedy that. A software algorithm builds a three-dimensional model of the page and reconstructs it into a flat shape.

The system in its current incarnation takes up an entire lab bench, but the teams hopes to miniaturize it and perhaps one day implement the technology into smartphones. This author is particularly excited at the prospect of no longer having to shell out hundreds of dollars for textbooks for himself or for his children someday.