Scan documents with your camera phone

[Brian]

According to an article at the NewScientist.com, NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have created new software for camera phones that will allow entire documents to be captured by simply sweeping the phone across the page.

Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20 centimetres 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.

In Japan, camera phones with less powerful capabilities are already creating problems for bookstore owners as users grab pages from books and magazines to read later on the train, according to the article. With the new technology which won't be commercialized for the next three years, perfect digital copies will be possible, leading to copyright issues. In order to alleviate this problem, whenever a document is captured the software will sound an audible alarm that can't be overridden.

[Pride Of Lions]

If it's a pain for bookstore owners, it'll really raise the hackles of security-conscious/paranoid businesses. Now, they have more to worry about than just thumbdrives and their precious data.
POL9A

[Maccke]

Really cool feature