Re: hardware: scanner info? webpage

[Seth Teller <teller@lcs.mit.edu>]

fred -- good progress.  comments follow.

"Fred C. Strom" wrote:
> 
> Hi SFC,
> 
> I've been thinking about the hardware for the SFC.
> 
> I heard that someone has a good document feeding scanner that works
> with linux. Would you send me the info if you have such a scanner?

i think david karger or his student has this.  david?

> 
> I looked at digital cameras, and it looks like a 6 megapixel camera
> would cost about $2K; it would be able to quickly take a picture of an
> 8.5" by 11" page of text at about 250 dpi.

ok.  you'd want one that could be run in continuous 
frame-grab mode, so that the system could monitor
the input area for the (dis)appearance of documents.

can you run some experiments with an existing camera
(you can borrow one from the G lab, cabinet behind
bryt) to see if 250DPI is enough to resolve text?
is there some public domain OCR 

> 
> A less expensive option would be to use a low-res video camera to get
> the thumbnails and then a document feeding scanner to scan the
> documents.

yes.  this would also remove the need for the user
to place each page (say of a multi-page letter or
statement) on the input area and wait for it to
be captured.  for this reason i prefer that the 
feeding scanner be part of our prototype, regardless
of the resolution of the "continuous" camera.

> 
> Touch screen LCDs that would work are available and they run from $800
> to $2000 depending on the size (15" to 20", but I didn't find any with
> more than 1280x1024 resolution).

ok.  have you looked at the touchscreens managed by 
patrick (pnichols) and john (jpa) in the G lab?  some
models accept only stylus input (i think we should 
go for true touch input).  anyone else have opinions?  

> 
> For the microphone, a headset with a boom microphone would probably
> make speech recognition easiest.

i'm opposed in principle to requiring this of the user.  
it seems minor, but i bet it would severely reduce our
take-up rate.

let's try to get some good directional microphones, or even
use a microphone array such as the one that trevor darrell 
is building in the AI lab vision group.

> 
> I just put together an initial SFC info page
> (http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/sfc/). Feel free to modify it or send me
> comments and I will modify it.

great, this is a good start.  you might put a mailto:
link on there, "Send mail to the SFC group," to collect
people's random ideas (within LCS and AI; i think the
sfc site is not served outside of those domains).

> 
> Fred

seth.