[anilgulecha]

Here's something that I think has not been done, but could be quite lucrative, building a high resolution scanner using the phone camera, multiple pictures and interpolation/noise removal.

Most phone cameras these days have good resolutions, and you could technically take a 6x4 photo, divvy it to 3x3 grid and take close up photos, and have smart algorithms interpolate the pixels to form a single image with high res. I'd even bet you'd results equal to or better than a flat bed scanner.

For better us, just open the camera preview and slowly pan over the image.

Has someone tried something like this? With FOSS apps like mosaic, hdr tools and imagemagick, it should be possible. I'm guessing opencv would be needed for interpolation and noise removal..

[brownbat]

I've used some free apps that turn phones into document scanners. Almost all banks I use have something like that embedded for check deposits. Maybe they're just doing deskew rather than dewarping though... loose documents aren't usually warped like book pages.

The next hard problem would be help with DIY book scanning. Like the camera could sit over my shoulder and detect when I've turned a page, then automatically take a picture of the new page. Then OCR kicks in, and conversion to EPUB, preserving graphics when pages have non-text elements. Mostly just feel like we can probably do better than the massive contraptions over at www.diybookscanner.org