My New Document Scanner

Great post, really enjoyed this article, many thanks for posting this.

That looks very.. hand made. So, what resolution do you get on your new document scanner? I need to scan my employment agreement and I think I'm going to use your idea. thanks!

Hahaha nice, very clever. I think I saw someone else do this with an iPhone as well..

@Sathya :D

@Wanderer Thanks for the link. I’ve tried out some OCR software in the past- Softi’s FreeOCR (which uses the Tesseract engine- the one which is used by Google to scan PDF files (remember the ‘View as HTML’ option?)) and ABBYY’s FineReader. In my experience, ABBYY’s probably the best of the lot. Again, the images, being 2MP, aren’t exactly ideal for OCR. I’ll give it a shot with a better camera (if I can get a better one/fix my existing one).

And like you said- you have to go back and forth between the image and the extracted text to make sure of the correctness. This is a pain. Although, there are times in college where going through this is worth it. I think you’ve got a fairly good idea what I’m talking about ;-)

If you’re scanning/photographing printed pages and want to convert the text in the images to editable text, you could use this

http://topocr.com/download.html

It “reads” the text in the image and attempts to convert it into editable text that can be used anywhere. It does a fair job. But you have to go back and forth between the image and the extracted text to make sure of the correctness. The software may read “close” as “dose”, commas as full-stops etc. I guess it depends on the clarity and size of the text in the original image itself.

Nevertheless, quite useful.

Hehe seems you have plenty of experience in these things :P Anyways thinking out-of-the-box is good ;)

@Sathya Thanks. The clarity of text depends on the size of the page. From experience (and being a student, I have a LOT of experience using cellphone cameras to take pictures of notes, journals, assignments, etc.), the camera I have (a 2 MP one) gives clear text when the size of the page is up to A4. Any bigger, and it gets hazy. Taking pictures of an open textbook is sort of tricky- the large size and the curvature makes the pictures a bit hazy most of the time.

Great thinking! The text has come out clear ?

All right. I’ve just tried Qipit, ScanR and Snapter. Qipit and Snapter have both choked on the images I’ve sent through- with Qipit sending back nothing but an error message without details, and Snapter crashing continuously. While ScanR has been able to come up with some readable images, The quality hasn’t really been very good.

To be fair, the quality of the input set isn’t that great, but it is a realistic set that one would come up with in normal circumstances. I’ll give it another shot with better images later and see how that goes.

@Kabir Thanks mate.

@Harsh Many thanks. I had read about Qipit somewhere ages ago, but had forgotten the name and lost the link. Thanks for link. I’ve just signed up and am uploading a couple of images to the site. Lets see how those turn out.

@Anne :D Haven’t we all? I needed a mechanism to scan a LOT of pages- so this is the best thing I could think of at my budget.

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To add a note here- this setup still requires a fair bit of manual work- with flipping pages and clicking the photograph. I’ve been looking around for a decent piece of software that would allow me to control the camera via bluetooth, but I haven’t found anything satisfactory yet. I have tried taking photographs with the sequence mode on my phone, but photographs are taken far too rapidly in succession to be able to flip pages in time. So there is quite a bit of room for improvement yet.

Haha. I've done this (without the tripod stand). Haha. I’ve done this (without the tripod stand).

After taking the shots of the notes (Handwritten or printed), using the Qipit service could do you a great deal of benefit! You can even send to it via the mobile itself. Check Qipit out @ http://www.qipit.com/

Wow !!
Get this patented dude !!

Very innovative indeed!

Thank you.

Testing Disqus. Hello World!

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A lot of comments missing for this post due to a database backup problem

Fair enough. But who said anything about NEEDING bluetooth?

you don't NEED bluetooth if you can transfer pics from your mobile to your computer by any other means. (cable, mem card)