http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7998

Camera phones will be high-precision scanners
16:12 14 September 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Duncan Graham-Rowe

The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and
Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone
camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by
sweeping the phone across the page.

Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by
using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and
magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work.

This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary
optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text
to be captured and digitised from images.

But with the new software entire documents can be captured. As a page
is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page
and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a
reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page
and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the
binding to be scanned clearly.

Copyright furore
Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least
20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This
produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract
the text and record any images.

“The goal of our research is to enable mobile phones to be used as
portable faxes or scanners that can be used any time,” an NEC spokesman told New
Scientist. But the concern now is that this technology will catapult the
publishing industry into a copyright furore similar to that which has gripped the
recording industry in recent years.

“There’s no easy solution,” says Andrew Yates, intellectual property
adviser to the UK’s Periodical Publisher’s Association in London.

“The music industry has been struggling with this for some time,” he
says. But with music the issue is whether or not you allow people to copy
music they have already purchased, says Yates.

Cause for alarm
With print publishing the situation appears to be even more intractable
because the new software will make it possible to make copies without
even purchasing the original, he says.

Licensing agreements may be one option he says. But also people will
have to learn that certain rules of conduct still apply. “It is true that this
technology may cause copyright issues if it were to be used in an
unorthodox way,” says the NEC spokesman. But NEC would never encourage such
behaviour, he adds.

According to NEC, their software is designed to sound an alarm when
being used, to avoid any copyright conflicts. The company claims that any
attempts to mute the device somehow or plug in headphones will not affect the
audibility of this alarm.

NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for
three years.

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