Dewarping Book Page Spreads Captured with a Mobile Phone Camera

Capturing book images is more convenient with a mobile phone camera than with more specialized flat-bed scanners or 3D capture devices. We built an application for the iPhone 4S that captures a sequence of hi-res (8äMP) images of a page spread as the user sweeps the device across the book. To do the 3D dewarping, we implemented two algorithms: optical flow (OF) and structure from motion (SfM). Making further use of the image sequence, we examined the potential of multi-frame OCR. Preliminary evaluation on a small set of data shows that OF and SfM had comparable OCR performance for both single-frame and multi-frame techniques, and that multi-frame was substantially better than single-frame. The computation time was much less for OF than foräSfM.