Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Camera phones will be high-precision scanners

NewScientist.com news service | 14 September 2005
Duncan Graham-Rowe


New 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.

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