Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

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BruceG
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BruceG »

The low size of the pages did not help to process. I would have expected 1 meg per page. I have just finished a newspaper under A3 in size and was 130-150 meg per page. Because of the size of the files it is difficult to say if the quality is good enough to produce a epub file. I have seen worse but not for a book.
Attached are files before and after editing. It was difficult to see , and . epub is not an extension that can be uploaded so I have included a Word file.

When scanning try to scan with pages on the same plane as the desk. If you have a thick book the distance between page and camera changes quite a bit, which effect font size and page size. For epub this is not a issue.

It would have been good to see a scan before page spliting.

I am using a Avision book scanner and some times scan 2 pages at a time. In ABBYY Finereader one can do auto or manual splitting pages, I usually do manual. If the pages are reasonable flat you could leave them joined, lines in both pages need to straight across though.
Attachments
DIY test 4pages no Editing.pdf
ABBYY Text on Top - No editing
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DIY test 4pages.docx
Word file Edited
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DIY test 4pages.pdf
ABBYY Text on Top - Edited where ABBYY indicated need
(55.85 KiB) Downloaded 127 times
cday
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

GemmaGem wrote: 13 Jan 2022, 22:04 So I was trying to takes some scans to show. The program kept shutting down on me which was frustrating cause I had to start all over again. This happened to me three times not sure what caused it. I had to keep picking the book up to maneuver it otherwise it would only scan half a page. The line to split the pages was never were the scan showed so I had to keep moving the book back and forth until I had a decent page scanned. It took me a lot longer than 5 seconds to take a scan like the manual said. More like 2 minutes and at this point I'm so frustrated with this scanner I'm thinking of sending it back.
If you are able to return the iOCHOW easily that would probably be a good move: while it may be possible to obtain better results than you have so far, you would probably be better off using one of the much better known CZUR scanners...

Regarding the images you attached: when viewed the page size is shown as about 3" x 4.5", which I imagine is at least somewhat smaller than the book pages? Consequently, with the indicated image DPI of 96 the text quality is quite poor, maybe a scanner settings issue. Edit: Or have you actually posted screenshots?

And are the book pages actually that yellowed, as your finger looks a normal colour, maybe they are?

See also BruceG's post above... :D
GemmaGem
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

So I took these photos with my Google Pixel phone. And I see what you meant by the quality of the picture. I was blown away. Does ABBYY have a feature to fix the photo to flatten the curve? I could just use my phone and save myself a lot of trouble.
Attachments
TGRR2.jpg
TGRR.jpg
BruceG
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BruceG »

These photos are half the size of the last lot. But still work. Abbyy does not have the flatten curve feature but it does have 'Straighten text lines' feature. This is the first time I have used the feature. You should be able to see this in the pdf file. The doc file is really a epub file so you will need to rename it.
No editing has been done except the 'Straighten text lines' feature.

Instead of finger on corner try fingers top and bottom at the centre of the page to reduce curve. You will then need a creative way to take the photo. I have seen a glass sheet and frame design that flattens the page for you. Its on this site.

You can get away with a lot if you only want text.
Attachments
DIY 2 page.pdf
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DIY 2 page.doc
Change file extension to epub
(3.01 KiB) Downloaded 116 times
BruceG
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by BruceG »

cday
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

GemmaGem wrote: 14 Jan 2022, 21:45 So I took these photos with my Google Pixel phone. ... Does ABBYY have a feature to fix the photo to flatten the curve? I could just use my phone and save myself a lot of trouble.
You might also look at some of the recent smartphone scanning apps, some of them look impressive and might provide very useful preprocessing including curve flattening at minimal cost, either prior to using FineReader, or possibly in place of it if they support OCR.

Edit:

One of many in a search 'smartphone scanning app', vFlat specifically refers to curvature and finger removal; there are also Abbyy camera scanning apps.
TS Zarathustra
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by TS Zarathustra »

Some out of the box suggestions GemmaGem.

I prefer to have most things solved before taking the pictures. In my experience the less corrections software has to do, the better the results are.

I have used fishing line over a page to straighten it a little bit without having your fingers in the photo. With good light it's practically invisible in the photo. It's a bit of a tradeoff, but the photo can be much better.
Another finger removal from photos idea. Use white cotton gloves.

For small batch OCR I have used Google Translate. It scans a photo and gives you quite good OCR results.
You can use Google Docs to create Ebook files from text. Depending on your project, Calibre might be better.
GemmaGem
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

I been playing around the app Vflat for a while. I really like it better than some of the others I looked at. The only problem is that when I plug it into Abbyy Finereader there are so many corrections to make. Plus I can only load up a certain amount into Abbyy Finereader to fix up. The weird thing is that the PDF of the Vflat scans show up fine but loading them in Abbyy seems to be when it starts showing up with corrections to make. I'm wondering if Adobe would work better than Abbyy.
cday
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by cday »

GemmaGem wrote: 01 Feb 2022, 21:43 I been playing around the app Vflat for a while. I really like it better than some of the others I looked at. The only problem is that when I plug it into Abbyy Finereader there are so many corrections to make. .... The weird thing is that the PDF of the Vflat scans show up fine but loading them in Abbyy seems to be when it starts showing up with corrections to make. I'm wondering if Adobe would work better than Abbyy.
Are you able to post an example of the Vflat output for others to examine? [If the file format can't be attached directly, it should be possible to post an example in a ZIP.]

I'm wondering if the PDF output that looks fine on the screen is a bitmap image, but one that doesn't convert easily to searchable text.

In general, I would expect Abbyy Finereader to be state of the art for recognition accuracy, so little reason to expect better accuracy from Adobe Acrobat.

Edit:

Vlat is said to produce excellent recognition results in this 2019 review of scanning apps, scroll to the end of the web page. Two years on any of the apps might have been updated, of course.
GemmaGem
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Re: Help...novice scanner using iOCHOW camera scanner

Post by GemmaGem »

So I downloaded an unedited chapter and transferred it to a zip folder. I also got two screen shots. The first one is the unedited of the conversion with abbyy and the second screen shot is what it looked like after I edited it. It seemed that ABBYY was working better than the first time I tried it, so it was easier for me to edit but it was only one page I played around with this time. I also only have 2 days left of the ABBYY free trial so I'm not sure if I wasn't to buy it or not yet.
Attachments
Abbyy 2.png
Abbyy.png
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