Carlo Traverso wrote on 3/31/2005, 6:52 AM:
Indeed, my attempts with a good digital camera (5Mpixels, manual focus, uncompressed tiff output, a special mode for text, a professional tripod, etc) have been poor.
I am suprised to hear this. I use a Canon S230 3.2Mpixel pocket camera with results as good as my scanner for OCR for ABBYY FineReader 5.0. This is a relatively simple pocket camera. The one thing that took some real work is doing a good job of lighting the book. I now use 2 lights mounted on each size of the camera (currently 13 watt fluorescent task lights, but normal incandescent lights worked as well). I had no luck at all using the flash. I use automatic focus, no flash, close-up mode, with a long exposure time. I use a copy stand modified from a hand drill press to position the camera about 9" above the book. I take each page separately, a 2k x 1.5k JPEG for each 7" by 4.5" page, or almost 300 DPI. The OCR results for 600 DPI, taking a picture of 1/2 the page were no better than the full page results. Clearly, especially for our purposes, the quality of the original makes some difference. How do the pictures you took look to you? It has been my experience that if they looked like faithful reproductions, then they OCRed well. It may be that your expectations of results are higher than mine. If you are interested, I could send you a picture to see what I get. Kent Fielden