Transform your Digital Camera into a Flatbed Scanner

We propose to extend the use of a digital camera to a new application, which consists basically in transforming it into a flatbed scanner. Our approach consists in simulating the flattening of warped documents, by means of computer vision techniques. In particular, with regard to the digitization of a book, we show that the drawbacks related to the use of a scanner can be bypassed. The corrections of some or all geometric and photometric distortions appearing in the image of an opened book, including perspective transformations, are discussed and compared, regarding two different techniques of shape from X, namely shape from shading and shape from contour. The performances of the proposed techniques are illustrated by experiments on real images.