Japanese Researchers Develop High-Speed Scanner
- 14 years ago
Simply flipping through a book may not seem like the best to way to scan it, but one Japanese research group at Tokyo University has created new technology that allows hundreds of pages to be scanned within minutes.
[Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, Tokyo University]: (Male, Japanese)
"It takes a shot of the shape, then it calculates the shape and uses those calculations to film the scanning. As it can film while understanding the underlying shape, it's very easy to then take the pages that are being scanned and save them as a normal flat copy."
The research team developed a high-speed camera that can take 500 pictures a second to scan the pages as they are flipped. Yet normal scanners can only scan the information that is actually before them on the page.
The flip scanner being developed is able to deal with the fact that pages that are being flipped through are normally deformed in some way.
While it currently requires extra time to process the scanned images, the hope is to eventually make the technology both faster and much smaller.
[Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, Tokyo University]: (Male, Japanese)
"In the more the distant future, once it becomes possible to put all of this processing on one chip and then put that in an iPad or iPod, one could scan just using that chip. At that point, it becomes possible to scan something quickly to save for later reading."
A commercial version of the large-scale computer based scanning system could be available in two to three years.
[Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, Tokyo University]: (Male, Japanese)
"It takes a shot of the shape, then it calculates the shape and uses those calculations to film the scanning. As it can film while understanding the underlying shape, it's very easy to then take the pages that are being scanned and save them as a normal flat copy."
The research team developed a high-speed camera that can take 500 pictures a second to scan the pages as they are flipped. Yet normal scanners can only scan the information that is actually before them on the page.
The flip scanner being developed is able to deal with the fact that pages that are being flipped through are normally deformed in some way.
While it currently requires extra time to process the scanned images, the hope is to eventually make the technology both faster and much smaller.
[Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa, Tokyo University]: (Male, Japanese)
"In the more the distant future, once it becomes possible to put all of this processing on one chip and then put that in an iPad or iPod, one could scan just using that chip. At that point, it becomes possible to scan something quickly to save for later reading."
A commercial version of the large-scale computer based scanning system could be available in two to three years.