Linear Book Scanner – Open-source automatic book scanner (2014)
This is a problem domain where software hasn't caught up with what is possible, so people do in hardware what could be done in software.With two or more photos or a stereo image (new iPhone?) one could triangulate to infer a flattened page, and produce images that look like they came from cut pages in a flatbed scanner. Now just pay someone well in Ethiopia to carefully turn pages without damage.As any researcher can attest, our digital libraries now hold a century of scanned work of questionable quality. AI could infer scans indistinguishable from an outline font format original on an 8K monitor.I once helped consult on the 1980's font wars, turning old formats and digital scans into Postscript and TrueType fonts. This was hard then, but will soon be understood as the "correct" way to scan text, when software catches up.For the scientific literature, we need a ChatGPT equivalent to reconstruct LaTeX source that can reproduce each page. (We really need a successor to LaTeX that isn't such an arcane language, and can author fixed and flowable text with equal ease.)