Sunday, May 3, 2009

Google’s Book Scanning Patent

Maureen Clements at NPR.org wraps up patent #7508978*, “Detection of grooves in scanned images”, granted to Google:

Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates.

[Via Gary Burd. Image from the patent.]

*Google also has a patent search and display site, but I can’t find that particular patent number in their database (yet) – in fact, entering [patent 7508978] into Google returns a patent onebox with a broken link. Otherwise, the way Google Patents displays the documents is vastly superior to how the official uspto.gov does it.

Google’s Book Scanning Pa ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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