As any student with a research project probably knows, copying pages from a book at Kinko's -- or anyplace else -- can be book-breaking work.

Scientists at Xerox say they have a way to take the kinks out of Kinko's with a new computerized copier program that makes picture-perfect copies of pages from bound books without damaging their spines.

Hitting the Books Softly

"If you've ever copied pages from a book, you're familiar with the problem -- dark, distorted words where the page is bound into the book," said Xerox spokesperson Bill McKee. "To correct it, most of us use the 'brute force' method for getting readable copies -- pushing the book to flatten it against the glass scanning surface, called the platen."

Library science 101 at the elementary grade level emphasizes one point above all else -- don't bend the book and damage the spine.

Xerox researchers Beilei Xu and Robert Loce have proposed a simple solution that should make librarians everywhere stand up and cheer -- a mathematical formula incorporated in the software of common scanners that eliminates the book-breaking problem.

"The programming of a mathematical algorithm to correct for the book's warped appearance on a copy machine will work," said City College of New York computer science professor George Wolberg. "The challenge is to find the spatial transformation that accurately models the distortion, and this is precisely where the Xerox method excels."

Poor Copy

"When a book page is not in uniform, intimate contact with the scanning surface, there are actually two distinct problems," Loce explained. "The variation in illumination causes some portions of the copy to be darker than others, and the variation in distance from the scanning surface causes letters or objects farther from the surface to look warped."

The result: a poor-quality copy that previous, expensive solutions have never much improved.

"The remote-sensing community has been applying image warping to invert geometric distortions induced by lens aberrations and viewing geometry for four decades," said Wolberg, who authored Digital Image Warping, a leading text on image warping and morphing.

Xerox even tried correcting for warped images -- with mixed results.

"At one time, Xerox sold a copier with an angled edge and articulated cover so people could copy pages without cracking books all the way open," McKee told NewsFactor. "Another solution is dedicated book scanners with height sensors, so the book lies face up, and scanning takes place from above it."

Instead of changing the hardware, Xu and Loce decided to look at an easier solution.

They changed the software, inexpensively.

"Since the Xerox solution requires no special apparatus and all corrections are based solely on the digital image itself, this has huge implications on cost. It can be applied directly on very low-cost scanners," Wolberg explained.

Using the same light that copy scanners shine and analyze, "we use the sensed light to also determine the distance of the book from the platen for each pixel on the page," Xu told NewsFactor. "Normally the light only provides information on the reflectance of the original document."

The new copier software mathematically compensates for variation in distance from the platen along a bound book page.

It eliminates the darker portion of the copy where the page is bound into the book and "de-warps" the normally distorted words running along the center of the page.

"This work is unique in that it is driven by illumination and the geometric optics model," Wolberg told NewsFactor. "The latter addresses the magnification that is based on distance from the platen."

Better Read than Dead

Some people worry that reading books is a dying art, but consumers still read books by the ream, and it is mainly for them that Xerox pioneered the new book-scanning technology.

"The software is designed to work with the methodology that is commonly used in consumer market scanners and copiers," Loce said.

But bookish Web giants, such as Amazon and Google, may also benefit.

"Google has announced plans to digitize a large collection of books and has formed associations with several key libraries for the purpose of bringing online a vast wealth of books that are currently offline," Wolberg explained. "Any book-scanning technology must address digital correction of warped pages of text."

The Xerox researchers presented the new scanning technology at the 5th International Conference on Imaging Science and Hard Copy last month in Xi'an, China.