Mass Digitization of Archival Documents using Mobile Phones

Abstract

Digital copies of historical documents are needed for the Digital Humanities. Currently, cameras of standard mobile phones are able to capture documents with a resolution of about 330 dpi for document sizes up to DIN A4 (German standard, 297 x 210 mm), which allows a digitization of documents using a standard device. Thus, scholars are able to take images of documents in archives themselves without the need of book scanners or other devices. This paper presents a scanning app, which comprises a real time page detection, quality assessment (focus measure) and an automated detection of a page turn over if books are scanned. Additionally, a portable device - the ScanTent - to place the mobile phone during scanning is presented. The page detection is evaluated on the ICDAR2015 SmartDoc competition dataset and shows a reliable page detection with an average Jaccard index of 75%.