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System Scans Hefty Tomes in Under a Minute

by Matthew Zuras on March 18, 2010 at 07:31 AM

Hey, Google Books, get a load of this! Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, has developed a system that can scan books simply by flipping pages under its camera eye. Professor Ishikawa claims that a 200-page book could be rendered by the machine in under a minute.

Details are a bit scarce (and the dear professor's accent rather thick), so you'll just have to watch the video after the break to see this contraption in action. From what we could glean, we understand that the system utilizes a high-speed camera that captures 500 frames per second, along with some variety of motion-capture software that locates images and text blocks on the page. We would love to see this go mainstream for all the public-domain books that Google hasn't yet scanned. We wonder if the finger-condom photobombs would still be an issue. [From: Boing Boing]

Tags: books, ebook, GoogleBooks, MasatoshiIshikawa, reading, scanner, scanning, top, UniversityOfTokyo

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