Page Flipping and Scanning at 250 ppm

If there was ever a device that was badly needed it is this toy. The mass of books out there that need to be preserved electronically are a small tip of the iceberg. What is way more important are medical records in particular. We have not come close to establishing a system there because of the legacy problem. This technology easily resolves that completely. An office can simply bundle and likely staple bind a stack of material for a given patient, run it through the device, do a quick confirmation check and throw away the paper record there and then.

Every business has the same problem and binding documents in some form of temporary system has been often used as a solution. It always becomes a pig for space. Law offices of course need this even more since they are expected to maintain their records to boot.

Just filing a year's invoices in a bound bundle makes them readily accessible and secure. Putting them into electronic form ends the physical storage issue.

So this technology allows vast amounts of material to be stored chronologically and generally put out of mind against a plausible risk of need, until a set point is reached when the data itself can be simply checked once and then destroyed.

BFS-Auto: High Speed & High Definition Book Scanner

http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/vision/BFS-Auto/

BFS-Auto can achieve high-speed and high-definition book digitization at over 250 pages/min using the original media format. This performance is realized by three key points: high-speed fully-automated page flipping, real-time 3D recognition of the flipped pages, and high-accuracy restoration to a flat document image.

1. High-speed page flipping machine at 250 pages/min

The automated flipping machine can provide high-speed and labor-saving style of book digitization. The key point is to design the mechanism not to cause obstruction for the scanner while maintaining full speed. The developed system can flip and scan the book at over 250 pages/min without modifying the book by cutting. Therefore, we can finish a book (250 page) within a minute.

2. High-speed & high-definition book digitization based on real-time 3D recognition

Our system continuously observes 3D deformation of the each flipped page at 500 times per second, and recognizes the best moment for book image digitization at the highest quality using the newly constructed original algorithm in real-time. At this recognized moment, the high-definition camera captures the document so that both high-speed and high-definition performance all is realized. The definition performance is enhanced to 400 pixels per inch. This technology enables high-speed and high-definition digitization with the speed of the developed flipping machine without missing any pages.

3. Real-time 3D restoration to a flat document image

This system has a technology to restore a captured image which is distorted because of page curling to a flat original document image by using the captured image and the obtained 3D deformation. This system's new improvement to processing speed allows real-time restoration for capturing books. In the diagram at the left, before and after images show the restoration process.