This paper presents an imaging system that reads texts from books that open less than 30 degrees (due to their fragile bindings) and whose paper quality is degraded. In particular, the system operates on the Scheimpflug principle to correct the geometric distortion necessarily introduced when imaging barely open books. We introduce the guiding principles behind such a system, discuss how it is calibrated and set up, present the results of imaging two dime novels from early twentieth century, both with fragile bindings, and discuss lessons we learned.
Recently, spatially varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions (svBRDF) is widely used as a model to characterize the appearance of materials with varying visual properties over the surface. One of the challenges in image-based svBRDF capture systems rises for surfaces with high specularity and sparkles, which require a dynamic range higher than the dynamic range of cameras. High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) for svBRDF systems with multispectral camera has not been addressed properly in the literature. In HDRI, Camera Response Function (CRF) plays a crucial role in the precision of results specially when measuring metrological data such as spectral svBRDF. In this work, we investigate the effect of CRF assessment on the precision of measurement. Therefore, we have conducted two experiments to measure absolute CRF using reflective chart method as well as estimate relative CRF by Debevec and Malik’s method for a filter wheel multispectral camera to be used in a svBRDF setup. Results are evaluated on two levels: radiance map construction and reflectance calculation, by comparing to telespectroradiometer measurements as ground truth data. Results showed that although the HDRI with measured absolute CRF outputs radiance measurements with the same physical units and in the same scale as ground truth data, HDRI with estimated relative CRF outperformed in terms of the precision of reflectance measurement.