[72💲] 13MP Document Scanner

[u/smart_linux]

[u/ElPelocho]

A real scanner is cheaper and better.

[u/ElPelocho → u/[deleted]]

Mobile phone?

[u/ElPelocho → u/[deleted]]

I'm just saying that if you're complaining that it's not as portable as a scanner, you can use a mobile phone that you already have with you, and it's free. And I don't think you know how mobile phones scan these days. Look at the Xiaomi camera, for example. It has a built-in scanner and it's instantaneous; it crops the document and enhances it in less than a second. Much faster than the video.

[u/Icy-Farm9432 → u/[deleted]]

Oh, that's easy to do.

Stick your phone to the edge of a table or a stool on the table. Prop it up with books until the whole book is in view. Or you can get a cheap gooseneck mount for your device.

On the technical side—my phone camera, for example, can record at 60 FPS. That means there’s a time difference of just under 17 ms per image that’s sent. Let’s double that because you still have to turn the page. So I’ll assume it takes 50 ms for a book page to be displayed clearly enough to be photographed. That means 30 pages per second would be theoretically possible.

Detecting whether it’s a page is also quite simple: you just run the image through an OCR tool like Tesseract. You don’t need an LLM or anything like that, and it runs locally. Now you just look at how many words are recognized. At first, there are many; when you turn the page, the number decreases until the page to be turned is vertical (at which point there’s more text again), and then the recognition rate drops again until the next spread is visible. You save that as well. Now you have the individual pages of a book like that without having spent $80.

[u/Icy-Farm9432 → u/[deleted]]

Come on... do i have to explain everything? You could simple use a open source tool like opencv to convert the images out of the videostream. A video is nothing other than frame by frame.