Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Decapod for RoBook Scanner

Introductions:

So far I am having a hardly thoughts on how I could clearly grasped designing stereo camera to capture imagery ;perhaps, via software or driver .Although the allotted span of time would take only just for (one) 1 semester. Apparently ,I have had this topic on the other part of my web blog that deal solely to "RoBook Scanner" and I knew that the topic would be too lengthy if I would not include or separated Decapod discussions here.

Decapod is an Opensource project ,it is a software tools used in a book scanning and was sponsored by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ; the project is being maintained by volunteers and dedicated people around the globe-kudos to them! Imagine how much is the cost of a commercial book scanning software? oh huge price. Anyway ,never mind because Decapod is free to everybody who aspire the best of its suited applications . Recently,I have included this project in my techno-blog because I considered it as one of the best freeware you can ever have for free .It is a combination of a different software programs which were intended and incorporated for book digitization.; and to mention those share & freewares: gPhoto, OCROpus, Image editing/cropping , kPDF and the server hosting too.

So am beleiving this was really a real open source community project -indeed.

I want to share here the steps in installing Decapod in Fedora version #13(the most recent release?) and Ubunto version 10.04 .I will try to test steps and find out if it would really give me a lucky try.

The last things to say is to get it done(OK here we go!)

Requirements:
Hardware:
2 Cameras (Canon G10 or the latest series)
Tripod or camera handler
Lamp variable lights ( to pre-scale ,shutter or luminance)

Software:
Ubunto 10.04
FireFox web browser latest release
Decapod
-gPhoto
-Imagemagic
-OcrOpus
-genPdf
-Cherrypy

Objectives:
To Install Decapod and its modules
To setup decapod server
To stereo capture image using two cameras

Methodology
:
Install tools and libraries
Download Decapod release version (0.4)
Run install script
Test decapod server
Test stereo camera capture

How-Tos:

Download
1)hg clone https://decapod.googlecode.com/hg/ decapod-0.4
or
2) wget http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://code.google.com/p/decapod/downloads/detail%3Fname%3Ddecapod-0.4.zi&usg=AFQjCNF0WtK35E69fflnd4CiPuDRbhiyEw

Install the script
cd decapod-0.4/install-scripts/
sudo ./decapod-all
Run the server with cameras
cd decapod-server/
python ./decapod.py
Run the server with no cameras
cd decapod-server/
python ./decapod.py --no-cameras

Here are the details for Book Scanning using Decapod-0.4

Detail(1) Running the Decapod Server successfully


2) Decapod server CLI activity status


Detail(3) The front end GUI of the Decapod server


Detail(4) Testing the Camera (stereo capture)


Detail(5)Calibrations before capturing


Detail(6) Image calibrations L-R pages


Detail(7)python decapod.py --no-cameras


Detail(8)Decapod exporting files process (PDF)


Detail(9)
Decapod on exporting image to PDF


Detail(10) Decapod Generating pdf


Detail(11) A lot more to bind and scans (thanks for a Decapod community!)


Remarks
:
First you need to install all the libraries and tools.You will have the options to have an automatic install script ;or download it and have a manual installations.
There is an active cli while running a Decapod server(opening it using Firefox -http://localhost:8080

Conclusions:
Cool as ice book scanning