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Cell Phone with Camera = Scanner

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Feb 24, 2004 08:20 AM
from the thats-a-clever-idea dept.
Portables Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "TechJapan has posted a translation of an Impress Watch Article regarding a new technology developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video. Here is the original (Japanese) NEC press release." I'd love to see before and afters to see how well this works.
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  • that's great but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bsDaemon (87307) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:22AM (#8372413) Homepage
    does it make phone calls?

    • Re:that's great but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SoTuA (683507) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:36AM (#8372524)
      It's funny, but it also is true. I would love to have a cell phone that is small, nice looking and JUST MAKES CALLS AND STORES ADRESSES! Why must we overpay for tons of features that we don't want or need.
      • Check out the Samsung A-460. It's pretty small and does all the basics really well. Mine broke and was replaced with a N-400, this big bastard with a color screen. I'm looking for a downgrade.

        Lots of friends have camera phones. I have a camera for taking pictures. Unlike these phones, it captures more than 1 megapixel. When I need to take pictures, I carry it with me.

      • If I may make a suggestion...I'm on Verizon and just picked up the LG VX3100 [com.com]. It's about as vanilla as they come, dirt cheap (I picked up mine off ebay for $70), stores addresses, has a scheduler and an alarm that you can use or ignore, has a great battery life, is tiny/sleek and looks great.

        --trb
      • This Washingtonpost article [washingtonpost.com](blah blah reg req'd) may shed some light for you.

      • Re:that's great but... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cK-Gunslinger (443452) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @09:39AM (#8373061) Journal

        I seriously doubt that you are *overpaying* for features.

        Compare the situation to PC hard drives: You can get a 120GB HD for something like $80. That's like $0.67/GB. By that logic, if you only wanted a new 10GB HD, you should be able to get one for $7, right? But you can't. There's about a $30-35 minimum outlay for a harddrive. Once manufacturers have the basics in place, adding extra/bigger platters in almost *free.*

        Near about the same thing with phones. You can probably get a barebones, does nothing but make calls and store numbers cell phone for about $75. But since all the electronic components are already there, they can easily add in a gazillion sotware features for very little $$ and charge $100 for it, which they vast majority of people will pay for.

  • I can make phonecalls with my scanner?

  • Ocr? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rotciv86 (737769) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:24AM (#8372430)
    Why make a hi-res image, why not just OCR it? That could probably even be done on the phone. Then you could email or send it as a plain text document, much smaller file size then an image.

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mwongozi (176765) <slashthree@NOSPaM.davidglover.org> on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:29AM (#8372473) Homepage
      Because it might not be text?

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster (625375) * on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:30AM (#8372484) Homepage
      OCR is overrated still. It's not that accurate, and needs more processing power than your cell phone has on board. It's still not ready for primetime.

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:4, Informative)

      by BJH (11355) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:33AM (#8372507)
      Because OCRing Japanese text is a lot more difficult than with English text?

      I'm not kidding - there are Japanese OCR apps, but the accuracy is way below English OCR unless you're using a really good page image.

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by swordboy (472941)
      Well...

      This has other uses... I've thought about it before. Like shooting panoramas. Stick the camera in the air... push the button and rotate.

      Voila.. panorama!

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dan East (318230) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:41AM (#8372553) Homepage
      Wouldn't OCR be more difficult in Japanese than english? With english many letters are required to create a single word, thus if individual letters are not properly recognized they can still be determined by their context within both the word and the entire sentence.

      In Japanese there are fewer symbols per word, many more symbols to choose from, and symbols that contain much more detail.

      So I would think OCR in Japanese would be many times more difficult than OCR in english.

      Finally, you now have a phone that is only useful for scanning Japanese. If it acted like a real scanner then it would be useful for any language.

      Dan East

    • Re:Ocr? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jovlinger (55075)
      The key idea here is that several lo-res pix (recall that a camera phone can barely take vga still, and the movie modes will be even less impressive) can be recombined to make one hi-res picture.

      You basically have to figure out where each lo-res picture goes and place it into the hi-res document. If you are careful, you can place several overlapping pictures with sub-(lo-res)-pixel accuracy, letting you increase the resolution even more. You use the fact that you have high accuracy in the time domain to h

  • Old tech (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lukewarmfusion (726141) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:25AM (#8372442) Homepage Journal
    I remember seeing news about Japanese scanner pens (smaller than any cell phone nowadays) that would let you write with it, OCR scan text, and it store the text. I don't have a link right now because I'm lazy. But those were a few hundred dollars back then - maybe eight years ago.

    This is probably just a combination of that technology (which never took off here) and the cell phone feature craze.

    • Re:Old tech (Score:3, Informative)

      by pacc (163090)
      C-pen [cpen.com] works like this, the pen takes images of the book and reconstructs the line of text without any wheels needed. So any patents on this technology must be old by now.

      However, c-pen takes this one step further and does OCR on it internally resulting in text only output.
      I know they have tried to sell in their technology to mobile phone manufacturers, seeing great opportunities in the built-in cameras, though I suspect NEC could do it in software anyway and C-pen since has had better success with bluetoot [anoto.com]

  • Here's the text of the article (Score:4, Informative)

    by laird (2705) <[moc.odnap] [ta] [drial]> on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:25AM (#8372446) Homepage Journal
    NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have cooperated to develop technology which allows for phones with cameras - even low resolution cameras - to act as scanners, by having users move their camera over the surface of the page.

    NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have devloped technology which uses movie recordings to produce high quality images, on par with those of a scanner. This technology will be aimed atcellular phones and video cameras.

    The technique involves recording a part of the subject to a movie, while moving the camera; the "Mosaicing Technology" analyzes the moving image and estimates the three-dimensional position of the subject, and under the supervision of the "Ultra Resolution Technology," the joining points of the image are deleted, thereby optimizing it so that even low resolution cameras can produce scanner like output. In other words, even cellular phones and video cameras can produce high quality images.

    Up until now, there were certain cameras that contained equipment to turn low quality images into high quality ones, but this technology marks the first time that this sort of technique can be accomplished with existing equipment. For example, a high quality image can be produced of an A4 size sheet of paper from video cameras currently on the market.

    Inspired by:
    http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/news_t oppag e/17729.html

    News Release:
    http://www.nec.co.jp/press/ja/0402/2303. html

    • Re:Here's the text of the article (Score:5, Interesting)

      by laird (2705) <[moc.odnap] [ta] [drial]> on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:30AM (#8372481) Homepage Journal
      I remember many, many years ago seeing people working on this sort of thing at the MIT Media Lab. The idea was that you could take a standard resolution video that panned across a scene, and by merging the frames over time create amazingly high resolution images. I remember motion being tricky to deal with (as in, things moving in the scene) because it would either confuse the algorithm that tried to figure out exactly where the camera was pointed for each frame, or cause things to blur. But if you panned across a landscape, the result was an amazingly high quality image.
      • This sounds really cool. Do you have any idea if there are any applications like this today?
      • This kind of thing would be excellent fun - and have some pretty neat practical uses too.

        Until it becomes part of one of the iApps on a Mac I doubt it will be at all intuitive to use - so it wont be!

        My dream application of this kind of thing? Pan around with a video camera semi randomly within a scene for an arbitrary period of time and have a bit of software capture this and 3D model the scene so you can walk about in there with very high resolutions. Any blind spots could later be refined with new video
      • AS a visually impaired person born with a loke low resolution retina. I can say that I used this ton compensate my disability to see details if not near enough.

        My brain compensated this by applying a continous eye movment (nystagmus). This allow my brain to get several low resolution moving pictures and be able to compute the missing sharpness and details.

        Many born visually impaired have this nystagmus as some compensation.

        I'am glad this become a mathematically and scientifically analyzed process. This is great it get some practical use. This remind me of the pictur analysis and filtering applyed to Hubble when it was known is main mirror could not focus correctly.

  • In related news (Score:5, Funny)

    by l0ungeb0y (442022) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:26AM (#8372448) Homepage Journal
    Stay tuned for the explosive shockumentary, where we demonstrate how two tin cans and a piece of string make for a handy alternative to VoIP.

  • Vinyl (Score:2, Funny)

    by eap (91469)
    I wonder if you can use it to rip tracks from vinyl records, as described in this Slashdot article [slashdot.org].

  • One way or the other it's coming. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ahfoo (223186) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:27AM (#8372452) Journal
    Whether some trick like this makes it happen sooner rather than later only time will tell, but eventually just in terms of raw resolution camera equipped cell phones will be functional full-color scanners.
    And this is where things get interesting because fair use permits compies of material in the library for research. But if enough students scan journals at high resolution and then organize and exchange them through the Net, there will be an enormous levelling of the academic playing field. That is a time I look forward to with eager anticipation.

  • Virtual Wide Angle Lenses? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jobbegea (748685) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:28AM (#8372469) Homepage
    It only mentions paper as the object to take a picture of, but it might also work for objects further away. This could solve the problem of the often very narrow angle lenses those tiny cameras have.
    Stitching multiple images automatically is nothing new but is CPU intensive. So Moore's law will take care of that.
  • All the people standing in front of some national icon (e.g. Liberty Bell, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben) waving their phones at each other... that could make tourists even *more* amusing!

  • Problem before? (Score:3, Informative)

    by neiffer (698776) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:38AM (#8372527) Homepage
    And magazine publishers (especially in Japan!) thought they had problems before with pirating articles...perhaps this is another forced movement towards changing the way we see and envision publishing content.

  • Old news (Score:3, Funny)

    by EulerX07 (314098) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:38AM (#8372530)
    I'm sure James Bond and MacGiver have been doing this very technique for quite some time now.

  • Security Alert! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erick99 (743982) * <homerun@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:40AM (#8372545) Homepage
    Remember when some folks couldn't take Furby toys to work because of their ability to record or whatever and that made them a security risk? I wonder if this phone that can scan documents might not prompt the same sort of thing in some places. Hey, it could happen....

    Take care!

    Erick

  • There is one thing that is not clear yet: How far away is "over the surface"? I mean, looking at a piece of paper from 1 meter distance is "over the surface", but I doubt it will get a high-res picture on a cell-phone camera. If I get closer to the thing I want to scan, then the field of vision is getting smaller. At the end that means that a cell-phone camera laying on the piece of paper that it should scan will only "see" a very small part of the image. So if I have to move it along to get the whole image

  • VideoBrush Whiteboard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by enosys (705759) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:42AM (#8372561) Homepage
    Has anyone ever used VideoBrush Whiteboard? I think it already did something like this. You could film a whiteboard in a zig-zag pattern and it would stitch togeather the video frames into a high-res image of the whiteboard.

    This software is from the mid to late 90s and unfortunately not available anymore. iPIX purchased the company and discontinued all of its products. There are a few links to buy it but they say it's unavailable and I haven't ever been able to find it on file sharing.

    Another interesting program they had is VideoBrush Panorama. It is can only stich vertical and horizontal pans (don't even try zig-zag). It's pretty cool to be able to get panoramas from video pans, and the software is very easy to use. There is no need for a tripod. You can get an evaluation copy here [www.bdp.it]. This [66.98.132.48] and a resource editor might come in handy if you want to use it.

  • Last July there was an article here [slashdot.org] on /. about Japanese publishers' concerns that people were using their phones' digital cameras to photograph magazine pages. I'd bet they are really worried now.

  • Old handheld scanners... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stween (322349) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:44AM (#8372570)
    Sounds like something of a workaround to get behaviour similar to that of the old handheld scanners that used be around (I loved my monochrome 300dpi handheld, it was just something of a black art sometimes to try and keep the alignment good).

    I can see why people might want to do this (panoramic photos suddenly springs to mind...), and if I hadn't been surprised by the uptake in camera phones, I might be jumping on the Slashdot bandwagon of "Who'll use it? I want a phone that only makes phone calls! I hate cell phones!!", but camera phones have *seriously* caught on, certainly here in the UK.

  • DoD Security Problems? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gato_mato (572107) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @08:50AM (#8372625)
    With the problems that the DoD has had in the past with Cell Phones with Cameras I wonder if this will get them even more scared of such technology.

    Imagine if they freaked out over 1Mega Pix cameras because they could take FUZZY pictures of classified docs - This kind of technology will send the DoD over the edge. As it is right now Cell Phones with cameras are prohibited in all classified environments (at least byt the NAVY that I know of).

    A Cell Phone with this kind ouf tech could be banned from the ENTIRE base/post/shipyard etc. One of the things that the drill into your brain in the service is that over time a bunch of little bits of unclassigied data can be made into a very informative report that borders on the classified.

    Just my 3MegaPix Worth
  • I don't know firsthand about this product, but I do know something about the field.

    This is almost certainly using a technique usually called called super-resolution. The basic idea is:

    • Take multiple offset images with a low resolution sensor (usually a motion sweep)
    • Stitch the images together
    • In the overlapping areas, you can now generate the most probable underlying pixels at a higher resolution.

    You can read about some of the underlying ideas here [cmu.edu] and here [mit.edu]. It's a pretty cool area of research.

  • Look at Steve Mann's Video Orbits (Score:3, Informative)

    by CandyMan (15493) <[javier] [at] [candeira.com]> on Tuesday February 24 2004, @09:09AM (#8372790) Homepage
    This sounds suspiciously close to what Steve Mann et al. do with Video Orbits [wearcam.org], automagically compositing different frames from a video, or still pictures of the same scene, into either a higher-resoulution picture or a wider-angle panorama. Sometimes the result is a mix of the two.

    You can even get the code from sourceforge [sourceforge.net], although now he seems more interested in his studies into what he calls "Comparametric Toolkit [sourceforge.net]", which seems to mix Video Orbits with software based on the Wyckoff principle [wearcam.org] (how to get high dynamic range pictures from one underexposed pic and one overexposed pic, for those who don't RTFL).

    I suppose the amount of processing power in those phonecams must be insane, or maybe the algorithm they use is more generic, but it is good to know all this Moore's Law horsepower applied towards useful stuff, not just Laracroftish games (ducks).

    Finally, it is worth of note that, although Mann's software is now GPL (I don't recall it being Free, or even released, last time I checked three years ago), at least one of the algoritms is under US Patent5,706,416 [uspto.gov], which of course is not nice, unless he plans to license it free of charge for GPL software.

  • In Other News... (Score:3, Funny)

    by turgid (580780) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @09:27AM (#8372945) Journal
    Sheep + Kangaroo = Wooly Jumper.

    *ducks*

  • So now we know how the tricorder will involve (Score:5, Funny)

    by johannesg (664142) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @10:03AM (#8373306)
    Years ago as I watched Star Trek, I was always left wondering just how Kirk and Spock managed to control all those alien devices they found. Eventually Bluetooth came around, and I realized it was because soon every device in the universe will have a Bluetooth interface (if you are in the US this may be hard to believe, but bear with me). Clearly the tricorder has a Bluetooth interface as well, which is why it can talk to and even control doomsday weapons, planetary defences, ancient medical equipment, etc.

    That still left the question how the tricorder came into being. Did someone sit down one day and say to himself, "I am going to build myself a tricorder?" That just doesn't seem very likely to me.

    But now I finally figured that out too. The tricorder will evolve from the mobile phone! Every year you can see how more and more sensor functionality is added, while the physical size of the phone is getting smaller and smaller. First they could just acquire audio signals. Then came video signals. Soon it will be able to monitor your heartrate, body temperature, and various other vital signs, and maybe even automatically call 911 if you get into trouble. Sensors for electricity, magnetism, seismic waves, spectral analysis, alien energy, and other things will invariably follow, driven as they are by our lust for gadgets, useless functionality, and the latest and greatest. Meanwhile rest assured that ever-increasing software capabilities will provide the ability to make rudimentary medical diagnosis, do chemical analysis, and contain drivers for every alien Bluetooth-enabled device in a thousand lightyears.

    While we are at it, you can rest assured that the very moment someone develops a universal translator, it will be embedded in a mobile phone.

    So there we have it: the tricorder in a small, handy package. There are only two downsides that I can see: if we are to believe Star Trek, it will at some point lose its communication functionality (Kirk was always using a separate communicator), and based on current trends the battery life may not exceed 2-3 minutes...

  • ALE does this and is GPL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adamdeprince (600460) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @10:44AM (#8373772)

    ALE [dyndns.org] is an open source tool that does this nicely. It is normally intended for turning a large number of images of the same thing into one higher quality image, but when you use the --follow and --extend flags. it can turn a sequence of images from a video into a single larger image.

    To quote from their site: ALE is a free software program that renders high-fidelity images of real scenes by aligning and combining many similar images from a camera or scanner. The correct similarity between images is roughly that achieved by a somewhat unsteady hand holding a camera.

  • Something similar exists for Apple's iSight (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zerosignal (222614) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @10:48AM (#8373809) Homepage Journal

    http://www.chiltonwebb.com/iStill/ [chiltonwebb.com]

    iStill uses a proprietary image enhancement engine, which analyzes multiple images and creates one single, high resolution final image by performing a pixel-by-pixel calculation. The result is an image guaranteed to be at least as good as a normal iSight camera screen grab, but which can be considerably better (for the math gurus out there, this is essentially a realtime convolution along the z axis). This is the first software product for the Macintosh to utilize this technique for still image enhancement, and is only the tip of the iceberg

  • In related news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dekashizl (663505) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @01:20PM (#8375574) Journal
    In related news...
    WASHINGTON (DP Wire) - The BLAA (Book and Literature Association of America) filed a movement yesterday in 9th circuit federal court to ban the use of cellphones in and within one mile of all libraries in the U.S.


    "This technology has no use other than the blatant piracy of books," said Samuel Ezzle, President of BLAA. "The numbers show," he declared, "that widespread use of these phone scanners has already lead to a sharp increase in illiteracy among children. Further, these devices violate the DMCA, and we are working with libraries across the country to review surveillance tapes in order to find and prosecute anybody who brings these anywhere near a library."

  • Already been done! (Score:3, Informative)

    by josath (460165) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @01:20PM (#8375580) Homepage
    I remember reading about this, like forever ago.

    It's called "Video Orbits," I guess. Originally, it was made to make panoramic stills from video. But it can also do the same thing mentioned in the article, sort of scanner like.

    Here's the writeup [wearcam.org] and
    you can download it over here [sourceforge.net].

    I played with it a bit using the movie function of my digital camera, transfering to computer, then using

    mplayer -vo png movie.mov && mogrify -format pnm *png && estcement.pl *pnm

    (make sure the binaries and scripts are in your path)
    You can play with the $steps= line in estpairwise.pl to change the settings. also, i like to take out the -display in estpairwise.pl, in order to speed things up, otherwise it draws each image on screen as it tries to match them up.

    will produce cemented.pnm.

    This works both as the article talks about, like a scanner, but it also makes kickass hires panoramic shots from crappy 320x240 video.
    Note: turn off automatic brightness/ auto white balance when taking your video, or it make look a little funny.

    no idea if any of this stuff works under windows. but it works like a charm under linux.

    • Re:Cannon (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rco3 (198978) on Tuesday February 24 2004, @09:22AM (#8372914) Homepage
      It's different because it's not just making a bunch of small pics into one big one, it's making a bunch of lo-res pics into a hi-res one. It's also different because it doesn't require YOU to do any alignment or adjustment of your composition.

      In theory, you could take a 320x240 movie of the *whole page* at once, moving around, and when the movie got sufficiently long the software would reconstruct a high-res image of the whole page, as in 300 dpi or some such scanner-type resolution.

      I realize that this is Slashdot, but you might try RTFA. You won't lose karma for that, I promise.

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