DIY Book Scanner

[horndude77]

I just found this site: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ (via comments on this slashdot article: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/09/27/ ... aphed-Book)

It looks like the setup results in less than 300 dpi grayscale. ~285 dpi was mentioned on the forums which isn't too bad. At this dpi upsampling and then binarization should work well enough. It looks like they were using an 8 megapixel camera. For larger books (like 9x12 scores) you'd need a camera better than 10 megapixels to get a 300dpi image. Ending up with a 400-500 dpi upsampled image wouldn't be too bad. The price (~$300 assuming you have all the tools and your time is free) and the ease of use seems right. It's still in the early stages of development, but it looks promising.

[kcleung]

Thanks for showing us the book scanner site..... I had a quick look. So an automatic book scanner mechanism is designed for fast automatic book scanning with minimal human interaction.

it must:
- get image on each page
- flip page automatically

the scanner on the site does not flip page automatically, but set up so that pages can be easily flipped by human (rather than lifting the entire book on flatbed scanner). This is what sets this scanner apart from ordinary flatbed scanners. The scanner must also be able to cope with curved edges and not turn it into black edges.

Moreover, the software will need edge-detection mechanism to determine the exact dimension of the book to eliminate any black edges. For our purpose, the camera only need to take stuff in grayscale, then the software convert the images to indexed B/W by using a threshold filter.

I just wonder is this the way CDSM uses to digitalize the scores.............

[horndude77]

Automatic page flipping mechanically can become very complicated. I can live without it.

Also here's another neat scanning idea: http://www.instructables.com/id/Portabl ... y-Machine/. You'd need a fairly high resolution camera to get good results I'd imagine, but this seems more practical for a DIY project.

[Mazin]

I'm curious as to how your math works, horndude77. A 9x12 inch document @ 300dpi is 6.3 megapixels. I'm hoping to use Canon DSLRs for my book scanner, which start at 10MP.

[horndude77]

9x12 @300dpi => 2700x3600 => 9720000 ~ 10 million
9x12 @600dpi => 5400x7200 => 38880000 ~ 40 million