BFS-Auto: High Speed Book Scanner at over 250 pages/min
Ishikawa Group Laboratory2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2018–2024
demo · general · evergreen · 2018–2024 on HN
A University of Tokyo lab demonstrates a book scanner that flips pages automatically and scans over 250 pages per minute. It uses real-time 3D recognition of the flipped pages and then restores each one to a flat image.
HN commenters bring it up in book-scanning threads as an impressive non-destructive method that is not commercially available.
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4 comments from Hacker News
There is this classic – very very impressive but to my knowledge not commercially available and probably never commercialized. 250 pages/min is astounding. ▶ this video
Do you happen to know if any of this mysterious researcher's papers might be on the arxiv? And have you looked into automated digitizing machines for your collection? The University of Tokyo seems to have a pretty good one: ▶ this video :)
I do enjoy the various methods of automatic page turning used by book scanning machines. None of them are simpler than a toy robot arm and a cheap USB webcam! - Flipping - ▶ this video - Arm with suction - link - Linear vacuum (google) - link - Vacuum prism scanner (40+ ppm!) - link
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages. I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software. Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: ▶ this video