Click-Free, Video-Based Document Capture - Methodology and Evaluation

We propose a click-free method for video-based digitization of multi-page documents. The work is targeted at the non-commercial, low-volume, home user. The document is viewed through a mounted camera and the user is only required to turn pages manually while the system automatically extracts the video frames representing stationary document pages. This is in contrast to traditional document conversion approaches such as photocopying and scanning which can be time-consuming, repetitive, redundant and can lead to document deterioration. Main contributions of our work are i) a 3-step method for automatic extraction of unique, stable and clear document pages from video, ii) a manually annotated data set of 37 videos consisting of 763 page turn events covering a large variety of documents, and iii) a soft, quantitative evaluation criterion that is highly correlated with the hard F1-measure. The criterion is motivated by the need to counter the subjectivity in human marked ground truth for videos. On our data set, we report an F1-measure of 0.91 and a soft score of 0.94 for the page extraction task.