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Old 10-05-2007, 12:34 PM   #46
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Good and not very expensive alternatives to copy stands or tripods

I almost forgot about them, they are really nice. I use them occasionally.

1. A Manfrotto super clamp with a ball head. You can attach it to almost anything: a shelf, a table, a chair, a lamp stand, etc., and you can take it with you anywhere. It is very solid and stable. I recommend a Manfrotto Photo Catalogue available on the internet. You will find there all kind of photo supports and accessories, including precise ball heads.

2. Same as above plus a quick removal plate

3. A microphone stand (image from the internet). You replace a microphone holder with a ball head and get the best camera "monopod". It does not take your precious space with three legs like a tripod. You can put it on the floor. With its long arm you can reach any place you wish. You can even put your camera very high over the floor with the arm set almost vertical to shoot large posters.
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Last edited by ereszet; 10-13-2007 at 02:55 AM.
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Old 10-05-2007, 04:22 PM   #47
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Mic stand! Great idea. Just hit up my musician dh for a boom mic stand. Now I have to find the camera tri-pod mount adapter and I'm in business.
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Old 10-05-2007, 04:49 PM   #48
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microphone stand to camera adapter

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Mic stand! Great idea. Just hit up my musician dh for a boom mic stand. Now I have to find the camera tri-pod mount adapter and I'm in business.
As far as I can remember (I have no mic stand at hand now), you will need one of those adapters to change the screw thread and size from 1/x" to 1/xx", depending on your mic stand and ball head for the camera.
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Old 10-07-2007, 02:09 AM   #49
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I run a paperless office.
I don't know what kind of office you run, but I doubt one will ever manage to operate an office paperlessly (well, in the near future at least)

things like seals and signatures in original papers will hardly ever be digitally substituted

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Old 10-07-2007, 02:31 AM   #50
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Paperless office

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I don't know what kind of office you run, but I doubt we will ever manage to operate an office paperlessly (well,, in the near future at least)

things like seals and signatures in original papers will hardly ever be digitally substituted
We will have true paperless offices in the future but for now "a paperless office" is something as described in wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office

For me, a paperless office is the way of processing information in the office. I store all the original stamped and signed documents somewhere in the office (it is the job of my secretary) but I never have to search for them physically if I must refer to them. I just use a few words that describe the subject and I retrieve in my computer a list of indexed files that contain those words (a boolean search is possible). I don't even assign any keywords to my document files, which is a standard practice in corporate "paperless office". Every OCR recognized word in my documents is indexed, so a combination of words and date of the file let me find anything in seconds.
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Old 10-07-2007, 03:11 AM   #51
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Paperless office and the volume of information processed

To give you an idea of the volume of information I process in my paperless office. Just one of the folders in my computer contains: over 100 thousand documents (over 2 million word count) taking about 7 Gb of disk space plus 300 Mb for the index files. My 500 Gb disk is already nearly full with all kind of info. Of course I use another disk as a backup. This year, one of my disks failed, but I only lost about 10 thousand pictures from my trips abroad (I didn't bother to backup them in time - now I repent that).

To be true, not all documents come from photoscanning. A lot of them are files recerived by e-mail in digital form or conference papers, government regulations, etc. downloaded from the web.
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Old 10-07-2007, 05:13 AM   #52
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Paperless office on the go

Big size:
- A laptop with a "brick" power supply. A Linksys wireless and a 3G telephone card. A tablet laptop would be nice but for the time being the prices are disouraging.
- Canon camera that can upload pictures via USB directly to the laptop. Another "brick" power supply for Canon.

Small size:
- Sony Portable Reader for crucial b&w documents converted to lrf or png (and some books for leisure). 2 Gb memory card. No power supply necessary for browsing 7000 pages.
- Archos 704 wifi for crucial color documents converted to pdf or png (and some movies for leisure). 80 Gb hdd. A small power supply (battery life is for about 5 hours).
- A Casio compact camera with a 2 GB SD card. No power supply needed for a few hundred shots - enough for a week long business trip.
- A small external SD card reader to move the pictures from the camera SD card to Archos (for Sony the SD card itself with all the pictures can be inserted directly).

In addtion, for both big and small offices on the go one needs a cellphone and a small power supply again.

A bit of advice:
When cosidering a compact camera for the small office-on-the-go try to find a camera with direct usb connection, unlike Casios that are very compact but require a cradle and a power supply.

I hope that in a year or two a color e-ink tablet with 7" screen, long battery life and 3G (etc.) connection will replace dozens of today's devices using "crippled operating" systems..
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Old 10-07-2007, 07:17 AM   #53
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can you tell me please what the last 2 photos here show?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...93&postcount=3

how did you achieve the last photo here? it looks like scanned, is it an actual photo? its very OCRable
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...7&postcount=13

last, how did you shoot the second of these photos? its very OCRable
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=28

thanks
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Old 10-07-2007, 08:07 AM   #54
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Light diffusor

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can you tell me please what the last 2 photos here show?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...93&postcount=3
It is a foldable light diffusor (photo accessories shop). When folded it is ca. 30cm in diameter. When unfolded it is over 1 meter in diameter. It is attached with strings and clamps to a lamp post.
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Old 10-07-2007, 10:33 AM   #55
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how did you achieve the last photo here? it looks like scanned, is it an actual photo? its very OCRable
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...7&postcount=13
thanks
Yes, it is an actual photo of a test page, to show that nice final results are achievable. I cannot remember now whether I took the DayTungsten.jpg and cut the margins or did I took another shot with a zoom to get that part of the page in the frame without black borders. I may have used Picasa to automatically improve contrast and perhaps add some brightness.

All that has little to do with OCR. It is rather for my esthetic pleasure. Finereader recommends not too manipulate the images before OCR processing.

In my experience, the only case when some preprocessing helps to get better results in OCR is when the original images are so dark that it is difficult to see details. Picasa's automatic contrast does the job.

In Finereader processing I recommend to change the resolution of the picture to what it really is and not what some cameras provide wrongly in the picture info (like 96 dpi). I usually change the resolution of all pictures in batch to 280 dpi (Canon Powershot 1) or I look at the picture in the Finereader full screen Window and change the resolution in such a way as to get the view of the picture as wide as the window is. I cannot explain the theory behind the last approach but it looks that if I can see the picture well than the OCR processing is more happy.
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Old 10-07-2007, 10:53 AM   #56
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last, how did you shoot the second of these photos? its very OCRable
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=28
Automatic black border removal and conversion to mono by ClearImage demo.

I convert color pictures of b&w pages to mono in order to reduce the size a picture takes on the disk. With thousands of document pictures stored on a disk, the size matters.

Finereader OCR can automatically convert color to mono on input (it is a legacy feature) but it prefers to deal with original color pictures.
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Old 10-07-2007, 11:01 AM   #57
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Finereader recommends not too manipulate the images before OCR processing.
this is very interesting, but I cant imagine what kind of logic it has, since manipulating image will make OCR easier

perhaps, ABBY recommends this because finereader already does the manipulation by its own? but in this case, I can't see how pre-OCR manipulation can harm

as for these photos:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=28
what improved the second/right image and made it perfectly OCR-able?
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Old 10-07-2007, 11:56 AM   #58
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this is very interesting, but I cant imagine what kind of logic it has, since manipulating image will make OCR easier

perhaps, ABBY recommends this because finereader already does the manipulation by its own? but in this case, I can't see how pre-OCR manipulation can harm

as for these photos:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...2&postcount=28
what improved the second/right image and made it perfectly OCR-able?
Yes, finereader does in batch: rotating, correcting resolution, straightening text lines (poor algorithm), despeckling, and of course recognition of blocks and text. On input it allows to detect image orientation, split dual pages and convert to black and white.

As for preprocessing they especially advice not to fatten or otherwise manipulate the pixels around the text.

The last question I already answered in the previous post.
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Old 10-08-2007, 03:34 AM   #59
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JFYI, a nice OCR article aiming to specify optimum OCR conditions
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Old 10-10-2007, 01:36 PM   #60
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OCR testing


The approach to testing Linux OCR programs in the link you provided is rather simplistic. It does not take into account that the scanned pages are frequently not "clean" and come with lower resolutions (like fax pages), they contain layouts with blocks of text and images, the text may be in different colors (the author didn't even test italic and bold print for his few selected fonts), the 8 point and even 6 point fonts are not uncommon in scanned originals, the original lines of text may be skewed and even curved, etc. One accented word he used to test the OCR performance (presumably with the French and English languages selected) does not give a clue about recognizing text with a number of different languages in one document (I frequently recognize by OCR more than six languages in old books - Latin, English, French, German, Cyrillic, various Slavic languages, plus their old varieties). While providing some hints on the performance of a few Linux OCR programs, the tests have little to do with real life situations. I am afraid that Linux OCR programs are about 20 years behind the commercial Windows OCR programs, like Finereader 8. It is not about programming, it is about recognition, cleaning, deskewing, binarization and other algorithms.

To give you an idea how correct is the recognition using photoscanning and Finereader 8, I used the line of text as in the tests above, and added 8 point plus italic fonts. Below are the results.

Number of characters (with spaces) 1852

1. Word document converted by software to jpg at 300 dpi (no scanning), picture attached - 6 uncertain characters (no errors)
2. Word document converted by software to jpg at 400 dpi (no scanning) - 16 uncertain characters
3. Paper printout of the Word document photoscanned at about 300 dpi, picture attached - 17 uncertain characters
4. Paper printout of the Word document photoscanned at about 300 dpi and binarized by ClearImage demo, picture attached - 11 uncertain characters

While most uncertain characters were recognized correctly, some where wrong - mostly wrong recognition of characters in the articles "the"). The 1% uncertain/error margin will make little difference when searching for a combination of words in an OCRred and indexed files, however it would make a difference for presenting the document as a copy of the original. That is why for the output of OCR the best option is to use pdf picture over text.

As strange as it may look, 400 dpi resolution did not improve the recognition but binarization did.

In the photoscanned picture you may notice that corners are a little darker that the rest of the page. This is a feature of camera zoom. To avoid dark corners you just use a lower zoom. The higher is the resolution of camera sensor, the lower is the zoom required to get the photo at a given resolution for a page of a given size.
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Last edited by ereszet; 10-10-2007 at 03:07 PM.
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