Inventor makes scanner that processes a 200-page book in one minute

IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip through its pages.

Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see" events too fast for the eye.

Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner.

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

• [Anonymous]

  I work in the library field on the digitization of print collections and, while there are some interesting advances in scanning technology that come around from time to time, I haven’t seen anything practical that does not require someone flipping pages one at a time.

  The book in the video looks like a modern book that is in excellent shape and is probably one of thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of copies. To me, the fastest and most efficient way to scan such an item would be to cut the binding, load the pages into a sheet feed duplex scanner, press “start” and go away and let it to its thing. Of course, a book that recent may well have been produced digitally in the first place, and the publisher may already have the digital masters. (Though, my understanding is that many books a decade or two ago were produced digitally but the TIFF or PDF files discarded after publication, because the publishers saw no value in them and storage was expensive.)

  The books that are of real interest for digitizers tend to be old, fragile, and/or rare, You wouldn’t want to rapidly flip through the pages of a 19th Century volume that is rapidly acidifying and whose pages crumble if not properly handled. No matter what the condition, if it is one of only a few copies, you wouldn’t want to subject it to anything resembling rough treatment. For these items, careful manual handling and page turning is required.

  The Internet Archive has a pretty efficient and surprisingly low-tech solution to mass-scanning of books, but even this has been criticized for being hard on some of the more delicate materials.

  • [oasisob1]

    College Textbooks. That is this device’s purpose. College Textbooks are inappropriately expensive, so someone buys one copy, flip-scans it and posts it online as a searchable pdf. Problem solved. Of course, that makes the consumer the pirate, instead of the publisher, but hey, in the 17th century that’s how they fought pirates — by hiring pirates.

• [sehlat]

  OK. When can I buy one of these?!!!!!!

• [teh_chris]

  college text book publishers: your days are numbered.

• [Snagdoinugo]

  This would be fantastic for classical animation… document feeders can be a bother

• [Anonymous]

  The only issue I see with such a device is that you would have to scan a book ‘twice’ one for the left hand side of pages and one for the right hand side of pages. Because the side that is ‘bent’ to increase its kinetic potential to flip, the inside tends to be obscured by the bend itself. There also requires a quick check to make sure each page gets ‘seen’ as there is the potential for ‘sticky’ pages. I had tried something similar to this using a standard video camera figuring I could simply capture each page as I turned the pages below it, and then simply take a good ‘frame’ of each page. But the quality of the video while good for people and things happening, wasn’t able to pick up the symbols that our brains decode into letters at a resolution that my eyes could discern let alone a computer could discern. I need better equipment.

• [jimkirk]

  Anon @10, this reminds me of a National Public Radio story I heard about using confocal x-ray fluorescence on old paintings. By focusing the beam to about 20 microns they do a 3D scan of a painting and by detecting the various elements can determine what the color is (cadmium yellow, titanium white, carbon black for example).

  Where it gets interesting is when artists paint over older images, sometimes multiple times. Then they can recreate an image of the underlying painting (or paintings).

  So I’m betting they’ll eventually be able to enhance this method to do a high resolution volumetric scan of a book, without even opening it, and then analyze and reproduce it, page for page.

  Here’s the NPR transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=112105590

• [nathan rae]

  Does this remind anyone else of the robot Jonny 5? It’s amazing how crappy SciFi is becoming astounding SciFact!
  http://www.nathanrae.co.uk

• [Yeraze]

  Interesting stuff.. But if the sensor is only 1000×1000, then each page is 1000×500 (less once you trim out the black-space around the book). Better have some large print on those pages.

  I’m sure later versions will get better, and it’s a pretty neat demo.

• [Maneki Nico]

  Somewhere, Nicholson Baker is curled up in a ball, weeping…

  Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper

• [Day Vexx]

  YOU ARE MY NEW HERO!

• [dmoisan]

  For retro fans, this just insured that a lot of old Sears catalogs will go online…

• [tim]

  This is getting interestingly close to the book-shredder/scanner in…. hmm, Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vinge?

• [Anonymous]

  screw the book scanner… where are videos of “robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity”??!

  • [benher]

    Holy shit, do you realize what will happen when the two are combined? The world’s print information will be archived in a matter of hours and then those out-of-work-but-well-read robots will turn on us.

• [Art]

  Absolutely tremendous!

• [Anonymous]

  That’s sick.

• [MadRat]

  Yeah it is like Jonny 5 and with a name like Ishikawa I can’t help but think of the great hacker from Ghost In The Shell.