Scan a book with webcam, read on monitor in large type.
 

Is there software that will let me use a webcam to scan a page in a book and view it on the monitor in real time?
I am in the early stages of AMD. Type on the printed page and fonts on the monitor are to small for me to see. I need to have someway to enlarge the books I am reading.

Unfortunately, the books I want to read don't come in Ebook format.

I visulize this as working in the manner of a security system.

A webcan is not a scanner although there are plenty of programs out there taht can take pictures with your webcam I doubt that it would make the book easier to read.

one of many .pic to text ;)

if you really need to use a rather low pixel count "webcam"
rather than a hires 600 ppd to 2400 ppd scanner
then OCR the tiff or ppm images
( a built in option on some scanners )


have a look at " OpenCV " and write a program to use the webcam
it is likely you will need to first "warp" and straiten out the lines of text from the webcam image

photos of pages in a book will NEED prescriptive adjustments near the spine

Thrift stores have thees all the time depending on your location...

Turns out 'Calibra' was in the Ubuntu repository. I will play with that for a while and mark this thread closed.


Thanks to everyone for their feedback.
D

Just plug a security camera with a lens that can close focus into your monitor/tv. No computer required.

i give in
what dose a ebook reader have to do with using a web cam to take photos of books

Or using your webcam (if it's on a USB cable) and something like cheese to view the picture from it full screen ought to do something like.Was my thoughts as I read this.

@ Dafydd

You can take a screenshot of your webcam and then crop the image(s)

Then convert the images to pdf with the convert command

convert *.jpg myebook.pdf


If you have access to an android phone this is much easier. There are two great apps that does this: CamScanner and Handy Scanner and they're FREE

Let me see if I can clarify some stuff.
I was remiss in the use of the word 'scan' which quickly deteriorated into 'scanner'. I had intended for it to mean a quick once over with the eye, as I learn the usage of it 60 year ago. Not make a copy of the book page and store it somewhere.

I used the word 'webcam', mainly because in my early days of computing everything was "roll you own" My original thought was to use the webcam to grab the video stream and feed it to a browser where I could use the 'ctrl+' to enlarge the fonts.

I will go back and revisit 'cheese', haven't used it that much and did not know it would go full screen.

VLC works for all (zoom, slow, speed,,,) even showing slides.jpg.gif.png.etc. and using a cam
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video4Linux

still confused tho but hope links help (they always do.edu ☮)

Digging around I found this. Opera has the necessary 'gstream' modules to view your webcam with your browser.


This was what I was trying to describe at the beginning. Now to build a rack to hold my camera and see if my goofy idea works.