Camera phones: potential handheld scanners?
By
Mike Tomkins
(Monday, September 19, 2005 - 09:49 EDT)
An interesting article from the website of New Scientist magazine predicts that camera phones will be able to function as "high precision" handheld scanners in the future.
According to the article, a cooperation between Japanese electronics giant NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology has yielded software that will make this vision possible. The user slowly passes their camera phone (with a resolution of one megapixel in this example) over a document at a height of about 20 centimeters (8 inches). An A4 page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan, and somewhere between 21 and 35 images are captured. The software then detects the outline of the page as a reference - enabling it to correct for distortion (including curvature of the page), and stitches the separate images into one higher-resolution image.
For more details, read the New Scientist article.
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