A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology have reportedly developed a technology to scan a book as fast as a person can flip through it. According to Yoshihiro Watanabe, who leads the research team, a prototype ultra-speed scanner capable of digitising a book in one minute will be built within two years.
The 'book-flipping scanning' system operates with a camera that can take up to 500 photographs per second, enabling it to record about 170 book pages in 60 seconds as a person thumbs through them. The system fine-tunes the distortion caused by the curvature of the moving pages. It does this by measuring their three-dimensional forms using infra-red beams, so that the images can be electronically 'flattened' to look like the original.
Earlier this month, the university researchers teamed up with Japan's Dai Nippon Printing to put the technology to practical use. Printing firms in Japan are reportedly diversifying into e-books that can be read using handheld devices such as Amazon's Kindle or Apple's iPad tablet computer.
