Abstract
In recent years, there has been an increasing demand to digitize a huge number of books. A promising new approach for meeting this demand, called Book Flipping Scanning, has been proposed. This is a new style of scanning in which all pages of a book are captured while a user continuously flips through the pages without stopping at each page. Although this new technology has had a tremendous impact in the field of book digitization, page turning is still done manually, which acts as a bottleneck in the development of high-speed book digitization. Against this background, this paper proposes a newly designed high-speed, high-precision book page turner machine. Our machine turns the pages in a contactless manner by utilizing the elastic force of the paper and an air blast. This design enables high-speed performance that is ten times faster than conventional approaches and, in addition, causes no obstruction in the digitization process. This paper reports the evaluation of the proposed machine using various types of paper with different qualities. Our machine achieved high success rate when turning pages at around 300 pages/min, showing that it is a promising technology for turning pages at high-speed and with high precision.
