OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Research and Development Center Co., Ltd. of China and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited announced the development of a technology that compensates for the curvature in open books or magazines, flattening out scanned images to produce an easy-to-read document.

Up until now, there have been several ways to compensate for distortion when scanning bound documents. One of these methods involved projecting a special pattern onto the pages. The nature of the distortion would be inferred based on the changes to that pattern. In another method, the pages would be photographed using two cameras to infer the nature of the distortion, and then image correction processing would be performed. There are correction methods that use only one camera, but after correction, characters may be vertically stretched depending on their position on the page, making legibility a problem. Fujitsu has developed new technology to flatten the distortion in the scanned image by accurately detecting the outlines of the pages and inferring the height of the document's curvature.

This technology makes it possible to produce an undistorted, highly legible image using only one camera to scan a book or magazine.

Details of the new technology will be introduced at the Twelfth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2013), to be held on August 25-28, 2013 in Washington, DC.