Digital Annotation System for Browsing Paper Documents
Background
The relation of documents and annotation
We usual read documents and annotate them to assist understanding or to make our site easy to find. I think the documents become more legible by doing annotation.
Almost the documents we routinely read are "digital documents" or " paper documents". When we read and annotate them, we feel some comforts and discomforts.
Good points and bad points of digital documents and paper documents
We can annotate digital documents on PC very easily. But when it comes to read them, we are limited browsing by the size of display monitor. In such a case , we must use sticky function such as zoom operation. And digital documents cannot provide the tangible operation.
On the other hand, when we read the paper documents, we can treat them as tangible things. But once we write in the paper, we cannot edit or erase the written things. It follows that the paper documents are sometimes useless.
As above, digital and paper documents have some good points and bad points. Some systems which have the advantages in digital and paper documents are proposed. But, as it now, there is no system which enables us nondestructive annotation to printed paper documents.
The aim of my research and proposed system
"Digital Book-rest" system
The aim of my research is to support browsing printed paper documents by nondestructive annotation. Therefore, I propose the system of "Digital Book-rest", which is shown as the picture below.
The proposed system is composed of a digital camera, a video projector and a pen with LED as an annotating device. The system estimates the position of the paper documents and annotated points in the captured image, and overlays annotations onto a real paper document using a video projector. Furthermore, the system can discriminates the documents automatically, and can overlay the annotation which had been written before onto the proper document.
With this system, we can
・Browse the paper document with handiness and viewing easily.
・Nondestructive and intuitive annotation.
and can support browsing paper documents. And it can be expected to display the digital contents such as hyperlink or movie onto the printed paper documents.
Performance validation of the system prototype
System prototype
The system prototype shown as the picuture below was implemented, and experiments are performed to confirm the availability.
Result
The figure below shows the performance of the system．
The system prototype enabled us to write lines or geometricgraphics in the printed paper of which character size was "10pt" with accuracy. And I confirmed that the system discriminated the documents correctly and overlaid the proper annotation image which had been write before. Futhermore, the system enables us to add the annotation again.
Conclusion
In this research, I proposed the system of "Digital Book-rest", which adds the erectronic annotation to the pysical printed papers. I implemented the prototype of the system, and find the system can be used like a markerpen by the accuracy of the system. I also examine the discrimination performance, and find the system can discriminate the documents precisely and overlaid the proper annotaion image onto the proper document.
