How could you use your digital camera to digitize and scan text?

[Albretch]

Including doing OCR on them?

I am a student trying to save money on copies you need from a
libraries. (Aren't digicams expensive enough already?)

Sometimes papers are not that good anyway and you only need sections
of them.

I know there are ways to tell an OCR software to read a file from the
file system, but I haven't found an end-to-end, comprehensive
explanation about how to do this, and AFAIK there is no web site that
consistantly lists features in comparison charts

Most hits I found after googling for it were about using cameras
primarily to take pictures, which might be not the case for the large
amount of students that would basically use them as scanners.

I tech monkey I know was telling me about high res imaging cameras,
which come with a PCI card to plug into a PC so that 'you get what you
see' functionality which is useful for running the OCR right and keep
working at the same time.

Could you explain to me at least your experience with such things?

What are the involved issues?

I guess all cameras are not created equal. Which ones are best for
text scanning? Those best for B&W Mode or gray scale?

I think this is pretty much doable with current commercial gadgets,
but I just don't know how.

 

[Bob Salomon]

Including doing OCR on them?

I am a student trying to save money on copies you need from a
libraries. (Aren't digicams expensive enough already?)

Sometimes papers are not that good anyway and you only need sections
of them.

I know there are ways to tell an OCR software to read a file from the
file system, but I haven't found an end-to-end, comprehensive
explanation about how to do this, and AFAIK there is no web site that
consistantly lists features in comparison charts

Most hits I found after googling for it were about using cameras
primarily to take pictures, which might be not the case for the large
amount of students that would basically use them as scanners.

I tech monkey I know was telling me about high res imaging cameras,
which come with a PCI card to plug into a PC so that 'you get what you
see' functionality which is useful for running the OCR right and keep
working at the same time.

Could you explain to me at least your experience with such things?

What are the involved issues?

I guess all cameras are not created equal. Which ones are best for
text scanning? Those best for B&W Mode or gray scale?

I think this is pretty much doable with current commercial gadgets,
but I just don't know how.

You just need a digital camera with 3mp or better and macro mode at more
then one distance if you want to crop, some lights and OCR software like
OmniPage Pro X (or the Windows equivalent).

 

[Bert Hyman]

In

Including doing OCR on them?

Since the free copy of ABBYY "Fine Reader Sprint 4.0" which came with my
old scanner can do it, I'm assuming that any OCR software can be pointed
at digital photos of pages of text and convert them.

I just grabbed my Canon A60 (a 2MP camera), photographed a piece of paper
on my desk, downloaded the resulting JPEG and OCRd it. The parts of the
page that were in reasonable focus and not too distorted perspective-wise
came out pretty clean.

If you had a suitable rig with a camera mount and some lights, you should
get decent results.

 

[rs]

The suitable rig would be a copy stand. Once that's in place then it would
be a piece of cake.

 

[Bob Flint]

Including doing OCR on them?

I am a student trying to save money on copies you need from a
libraries. (Aren't digicams expensive enough already?)

Sometimes papers are not that good anyway and you only need sections
of them.

I know there are ways to tell an OCR software to read a file from the
file system, but I haven't found an end-to-end, comprehensive
explanation about how to do this, and AFAIK there is no web site that
consistantly lists features in comparison charts

Most hits I found after googling for it were about using cameras
primarily to take pictures, which might be not the case for the large
amount of students that would basically use them as scanners.

I tech monkey I know was telling me about high res imaging cameras,
which come with a PCI card to plug into a PC so that 'you get what you
see' functionality which is useful for running the OCR right and keep
working at the same time.

Could you explain to me at least your experience with such things?

What are the involved issues?

I guess all cameras are not created equal. Which ones are best for
text scanning? Those best for B&W Mode or gray scale?

I think this is pretty much doable with current commercial gadgets,
but I just don't know how.

I've done it in the past - I found you need to convert the picture to a 2-color
TIF file at 300 DPI to get success... You will want maybe 50-pixel high
letters...