I ran across this piece of software recently and it sounds interesting. Book Restorer will take the materials you have digitized -- e.g., a book -- and help you create an ebook. As they say, it "allows you to simulate a book structure. " You can try out the product for free for 30 days (with some limitations on what you can do).
Nothing on the web site hints at the price for the product or how to purchase a full version. If anyone has used it, please feel free to leave a comment and tell us what it is like. It sounds cool, but is it?
Technorati tag:
ebooks
2 comments:
In many aspects the Book Restorer software is more powerful than the competition. In particular it uniquely allows the use of 1D and 2D perspective correction of a scanned image (for example, say you have a scan of a book (2-up), and the pages are bowed out close to the spine, making the text size non-uniform). This software maps out each part of the page, and flattens it, to give a perspective correct image. It can also do the same for lighting, which is a significant help with tightly bound books where the content is close to the spine, by having this area "lit" at the same intensity as the rest of the page, it helps image quality. No more hot spots of illumination.
http://ww.i2s-bookscanner.com/en/demos_modules.asp?p=2#titre
Some of the links seem to be broken on the i2S webpage, they are in the midst of upgrading their website. But it gives you an idea of the capabilities.
With other software they can at best do a crude trapezoidal correction, which applies the same template for every page. Also I believe Book Restorer uses bicubic interpolation when scaling an image to a different dpi than the original, the other software uses bilinear interpolation, which whilst fast, gives very poor results (lots of artifacts).
I believe the cost of the full product is less than $5000, about the same cost as the Kirtas BookScan Editor product.
http://ww.i2s-bookscanner.com/pdf/digibook_mag_no2.pdf
Some images of the geometrical correction in operation, on page 2.
Post a Comment