A Digital Outrigger

Decapod is an interesting project with partners from Germany, Canada, and Anarbor, MI and funded through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From the site:

The solution will address these problem areas:

1. Allow the camera based capture of bound material by using computer vision techniques to produce flat, clean page images equivalent to those produced from a flat bed scanner.
2. Remove the need for extensive operator intervention in the capture process by detecting scan problems and allowing the operator to rectify the scan immediately.
3. Reduce user intervention in the conversion process by using advanced document understanding techniques to remove almost all intervention, and by reducing the remainder to very simple “1-click” operations.
4. PDF/A outputs will be visually faithful to the original, searchable, and widely usable.
5. Allow the output to be viewable on mobile devices that support PDF reflow.
6. Remove the need for deep software, hardware or digitization skills by integrating all software components into a turnkey end-to-end solution.
7. Remove capital cost barriers by using consumer grade cameras.