Editing Book Scanner Software

=== Introduction ===

This page is for document efforts beginning in 2017 to create a software OCR pipeline.

This is a continuation of efforts by the [[Digital Archivists]] Working Group to make the book scanner more convenient to work with.
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=== Platform ===
The current hardware platform consists of the following elements-
* A wooden book scanner\ frame, built by members of the Digital Archivists working group
* Two cameras (currently Canon EOS Rebel T3), mounted in the book scanner
* Lighting, glass plates, book platen
* USB cables connecting cameras to computer
* Apple Mac Mini (mid 2010: Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256MB)
* macOS Sierra 10.12.3
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=== Intent ===
The intent of this effort is provide an OCR facility to help create digital documents from the pages photographed by the book scanner platform.  Aspects of this may include-
* Photo manipulation (cropping, rotation, image adjustments)
* Partitioning of photos to provide hints to the software about text versus image regions
* OCR conversion of characters in photos to text files
* Hooking into the OCR API to obtain confidence level or probability data about each image conversion result, possibly for directing the human operator to regions that may need correcting
* Connecting together and automating of any of these aspects

=== Softwares ===
==== Scanner & Camera Control ====
* [[CHDK]]: Camera control package that [[User:SteeleNivenson|Steele Nivenson]] has been hacking on, to the point it's functioning quite well with used, low-cost 16MP mirrorless Canon pocket cameras (PowerShot A2200, A2500), in addition to the EOS DSLR lineup.

==== Acquisition & Image Post-Processing ====
* [https://github.com/DIYBookScanner/spreads spreads]: Project on Github implementing acquisition through OCR, apparently by [https://github.com/jbaiter Johannes Baiter].

=== Efforts ===
* [[4 March 2017: A session with Tesseract]]
* [[16 March 2017: Test a Trial Copy of ABBYY FineReader]], an image-to-PDF OCR package starting around $120
* [[18 March 2017: Install and try out Spreads on a Mac Mini]]
* [[20 March 2017: Continue Spreads Install on a Mac Mini]]
* [[30 May 2017: Test a copy of PDFScanner]], a macOS scanner/image-to-PDF package costing about US$16