Auto scanning with border and angle detection works decently well [0], mini tripods with phone brackets abound. It’s very easy to set a phone above the table at a slight angle (that makes it easier to move the docs in and out and get rid of shadows) with the app auto scanning every sheet that’s laid below.
[0] I used Scanner Pro by Readle, on iOS for reference
Google Photoscan mentioned by someone else is also great, it's available on iOS and Android
It takes a series of photos, and guides you to move the phone as the document is illuminated from different angles by the led flash. It then blends them for optimal result to eliminate glare
As a prof seeings students waste time scanning their homework, one gadget I want to build is a easy to use scanner, with a Rpi Zero and a cheap camera.
The idea is to have the camera with a wide angle lens attached to the top of stack of papers/notebook. Pressing a button takes a picture, and then does a affine transform (?) on it get the perspective right, then uploads it to the LMS.
Just a clean, hassle free experience. No orienting your phone awkwardly, no getting the lighting right, no mini edits on your phone, no compiling pdfs.
Also, very useful for me, as I like to do math by hand.
Edit: Image https://imgur.com/Fb45H7M.png The fact that camera is fixed relative to paper means the transform is also fixed. Multi-colored led (and knowledge of paper color) can also fix lighting.
Nice! Maybe I won't need to implement this myself then.
Now if only someone would release designs for an affordable, reliable, non-destructive robot to do the physical data collection... My backlog of notes is way to big to stand around snapping cell phone photos at all of it manually.
I've wanted something similar, but based on motion sensor. I essentially want it to act as if the document is fixed in space, and I am looking at it through the phone.
Can you recommend a quick, easy method for scanning all the pages?
I like paper notebooks, too. Someday, I'd like to have an app that would let me turn any ordinary stack of scratch paper or notebook into a searchable PDF in under 5 minutes. I would finish a notebook and just put my phone on a gooseneck stand and turn the pages one at a time (not riffle) at one page per second or two, and it would know when to take the photos, which it would flatten, orient, and bind into a PDF of the notebook. It would maintain my handwritten pages but add an OCR'ed backstore of the text that could be used to create something like a table of contents, an index, and a fulltext search.
I imagine some portion of that is already available, and the rest will be arriving anytime now.
Scanning with your phone is getting easier. At a minimum you can take a pic of each of the pages. Software can clean up the images, sorta. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing.
I agree this would be a cool thing to have, but: back up, send it out: many people have a phone that can help there (snap a photo and email it; imperfect, but often will do the job)
Also, I guess you need the OCR because flipping through pages is too slow to be useful.
Another disadvantage of this is that it you can look at only one sheet at a time. With a paper notebook, you can tear of some pages if desired.
How about a notebook that scans for you? I.e. one side is a notepad, other side has a tiny camera on rails, close the notebook and it automatically scans and uploads the written page.
If you don't need frequent scanning of multi-page documents, scanner apps for smartphones do stunningly good job of creating PDF document scans using the camera.
I would pay a monthly subscription for an app on my phone where I can take a picture of the doc and it will just immediately upload to the cloud without any bullshit. And I can go back and re-sort these document later with an intuitive UI.
What I have to do currently is use one of those document scanner apps on my phone to take a picture. It will give me a reasonably good pdf doc from that picture, but then I got to press multiple buttons to eventually email the doc to myself. Then I have to go into my mailbox and sort the doc into my google drive. Ultimately, it works, but also very annoying.
I don't have an iPhone, but on Android there is the "Paperless Mobile" app (https://github.com/astubenbord/paperless-mobile), which can be used to scan as well. There are just some documents that I would prefer to have in proper and consistent "document scanner"-quality; I am always having a hard time with lighting using those phone scanners (although Paperless Mobile is one of the better ones I have used).
A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers:
iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so well, and this is from someone who helps digitize and preserve paper documents for a living.
Here's what I did, which works much better than phone apps or scanners.
Mount a digital camera on a tripod and bring a couple lamps over for strong uniform lighting. Turn the page, take a picture, turn the page, take a picture. You'll go through a 100 page notebook in 10 minutes (not an exaggeration). There are better quality ways to digitize documents, but I don't know of anything cheaper and faster.
Auto scanning with border and angle detection works decently well [0], mini tripods with phone brackets abound. It’s very easy to set a phone above the table at a slight angle (that makes it easier to move the docs in and out and get rid of shadows) with the app auto scanning every sheet that’s laid below.
[0] I used Scanner Pro by Readle, on iOS for reference
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