BFS-Auto: High Speed Book Scanner at over 250 pages/min

There is this classic – very very impressive but to my knowledge not commercially available and probably never commercialized. 250 pages/min is astounding. [VIDEO]

Do you happen to know if any of this mysterious researcher's papers might be on the arxiv? And have you looked into automated digitizing machines for your collection? The University of Tokyo seems to have a pretty good one: [VIDEO] :)

> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages. I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software. Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: [VIDEO]

I do enjoy the various methods of automatic page turning used by book scanning machines. None of them are simpler than a toy robot arm and a cheap USB webcam! - Flipping - [VIDEO] - Arm with suction - [LINK] - Linear vacuum (google) - [LINK] - Vacuum prism scanner (40+ ppm!) - [LINK]