Geometric Correction: Page Curl

Introduction
For old books and newspapers it is often not possible to remove the binding before digitizing the individual pages. This often results in distorted pages images due to the warping implied by the books binding (Figure 1).



Other reasons for distorted pages can be environmental conditions like humidity (which can cause page shrinking over time) or a wrong camera setup.

The Page Curl Correction is a command-line tool capable of detecting such distortions and correcting them automatically. This can significantly improve the results of a subsequent text recognition step since most OCR algorithms neglect this kind of distortion. More information about the tool can be found here:

Non-technical requirements
Page Curl Correction does not have a graphical user interface (GUI) and therefore requires some basic knowledge on how to use and execute the command-line programs.

Licensing
The tool is produced by the Computational Intelligence Laboratory, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" (NCSR). For more information on terms and conditions to use the tool, please contact |NCSR.

Files
Filename: Page_Curl_Correction_setup.exe

Description: Installation wizard for installing the tool on a Windows system.

Installation Instructions
Page Curl Correction comes with an installer wizard that guides the user through the installation process (It is currently available for Microsoft Windows only). The wizard extracts the installation package to your local C:\ drive.

Quick Start Guide
To get started with the Page Curl Correction tool just choose a sample image and try one of the examples in the “Examples” section. A description of the parameters for the configuration of the tool can be found in the following section.

Configuration and Customization
The Page Curl Correction tool can be configured using command-line parameters. The most important parameter is the one for controlling coarse or fine-grained rectification. Coarse-grained rectification is a computationally low cost transformation which addresses the projection of a curved surface (the original page) to a 2D rectangular area (the scanned image). Fine-grained rectification is a more advanced technique based on text line & word segmentation (See for more information).

The basic call pattern looks like this:

Page_Curl_Correction [0/1] [in] [out]

More information can be found in the following slides:.

Workflow Integration
The Page Curl Correction tool can be integrated into any workflow or application that allows the execution of command-line tools. The configuration is rather straight forward since the tool has only three parameters: input, output and fine/coarse-grain adjustment.

Examples
Perform a page curl correction on a sample image, use coarse reification:

Page_Curl_Correction 1 sample.tif result.tif