PageBuilder - Request for suggestiong on next revision

[Aaron]

I am the author of the original PageBuilder software posted with the Book scanner's instructable on www.instructable.com. Having used it for a while now I can see some room for improvement. Below is a list of ideas I'm playing with. Please let me know what you think and feel free to add your own suggestions for improvements to future releases. I do have a dissertation to complete, but I will try to address your suggestions in my free time.

Ideas for improvements:

1. Automatic background subtraction. The idea here is that I would design the software to automatically remove the black background from each page. This will require analyzing each page independently, and will definitely result in longer processing times, but will ultimately result in me spending less time sitting in front of the computer doing things and will get around the problem of the pages shifting between the four sampled pages that I can currently interpolate between.

2. Creating a PDF from jpg's. Right now the way the program makes pdf's is it puts the raw pixel values in the PDF document. This results in a massive PDF. I really see now why they invented image compression - my original desire was to have the best resolution document possible, but now that I see how big those suckers can get (I've had one go as big as 3 Gb before), I think I'll cave in and go the jpg route. I have already made the software capable of outputting jpg's of the post-processed pages, but I looked at the PDF specs and it looks like you can get these into the PDF once you've generated them. I'll have to spend some more time going over the specs and figuring out exactly how to do this, but it is definitely not impossible.

3. Automatic registration. Generally the pages I get look pretty nice, but sometimes they are a little tilted. I think I can get the tilt from the Fourier transform and automatically rotate the pages just the right amount to get them perfectly registered. I can't make any promises, but it seems theoretically plausible.

[Karyudo]

Regarding #2, above: How about PNG? It's both lossless and compressed. Not as small as JPG for photos, but better than uncompressed.

[jradi]

I actually haven't gotten around to trying pagebuilder yet. What's the difference between PageBuilder and PostProcessor? Are they complementary to each other or fulfill completely different goals? I just want to process all my images to be read into ABBYY. Ideally I'd have the images rotated and cropped to eliminate the second page.

[daniel_reetz]

One big difference: PageBuilder requires that you specify page borders. PostProcessor finds them automatically.
Another big difference: PB is build on expensive, closed-source tools; PP is free and unencumbered.

I would suggest that PostProcessor is a better choice for you at the moment, because Rob is actively improving it and monitoring the forum. Aaron did a great thing with PageBuilder, but AFAIK he hasn't come back to check on requests and isn't planning any major revisions. He did implement a JPG output option that would work to get things into Abby, though.

[jradi]

Can someone post here a link to pagebuilder, the mathlab software, and anything necessary to get it up and running? I know it's on instructables, but that sight isn't as convenient to search as this one...

[jradi]

I saw that there's a version of pagebuilder that exports to jpg for XP. Can you guys tweak the vista version to output to jpg (or has that been done already?)

[daniel_reetz]

Yep. Here's PageBuilder2 with JPG output for Windows XP:
http://danreetz.com/book_scanner/PgBldr2_JPEG_XP.zip

Here's the Matlab Component Runtime:
http://danreetz.com/book_scanner/MCRInstaller.exe

I'll have to get access to a Vista machine to do a Vista build for you. I'll have it for you by tomorrow night, but possibly tonight.