SBIR Phase I: Book Scanner Technology for Universal Access to Digital Books

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段研究项目旨在开发一种低成本、高速的自动图书扫描仪，以将大量装订印刷品图书馆数字化。尽管无处不在地使用计算机来创建现代出版物，但流通中的大多数文学作品仍然完全处于数字领域之外。这使得搜索引擎和数字图书馆无法访问大量图书。现在从印刷页面转换为数字格式的绝大多数图书都是手动扫描的。这是一个缓慢、乏味和昂贵的过程，阻碍了几家以数字形式提供图书和内容的公司扫描数百万本图书的能力。对于身体残疾的人来说，电子版图书可以让他们超越翻页的机械限制和固定大小小字体的视觉限制。对于学生、研究人员和所有渴望数字图书馆的人来说，将传统书籍数字化对于合法合理使用目的也具有实际重要性。数字图书馆可以从便携性和搜索引擎中受益。预计公司、图书馆、政府机构和高端消费市场对图书扫描的合法个人使用将对教育、研究和商业产生广泛影响。该项目的目标是以不到竞争产品十分之一的价格开发一种可靠的解决方案。该设备解决了图书扫描中的两个核心问题--自动翻页和页面平面化。一种新颖的旋转门设计被引入，以保持书的平开，以及将书页从书的一边移动到另一边。弯曲刚度、摩擦力和接触压力的分析将使图像采集系统的输入能够融合具有最小失真的输入图像。可行性将通过测量成像系统的配准(对准)误差并确定在图像融合操作期间将多个页面图像配准时是否达到亚像素精度来确定。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project seeks to develop a low-cost high-speed automatic book scanner to digitize vast libraries of bound printed matter. Despite the ubiquitous use of computers to create modern publications, the majority of literature in circulation remains exclusively outside the digital domain. This renders large volumes of books to be inaccessible to search engines and digital libraries. The vast majority of books that are now converted from the printed page to digital format are scanned manually. This is a slow, tedious, and costly process that is hinders the ability to scan the millions of books by several companies that provide books and content in digital form. For people with physical disabilities, the digital version of books can enable them to reach beyond the mechanical limitations of page turning and the visual limitations of small fixed-sized fonts. Digitizing traditional books is also of practical importance for legal fair-use purposes by students, researchers, and all people who yearn for a digital library that can benefit from portability and search engines. It is anticipated that legal personal use of book scanning by corporations, libraries, government agencies, and high-end consumer markets will have broad impact on education, research, and commerce. The objective of this project is to develop a robust solution at less than one tenth the price of competing products. The proposed device addresses two core problems in book scanning -- automatic page turning and page flattening. A novel turnstile design is introduced to hold the book open flat, as well as to move a page from one side of the book to the other. The analysis of bending stiffness, friction, and contact pressure will enable the input to the image acquisition system to fuse input images having minimal distortion. Feasibility will be determined by measuring the registration (alignment) error of the imaging system and determining if sub-pixel accuracy is achieved in registering multiple page images together during the image fusion operation.