Decapod is an open source project focused on building a low-cost digitization solution that will allow for rare materials, materials held in collections without large budgets, and other scholarly content to be digitized into a high-quality PDF format. This project will work to incorporate the hardware and software necessary to accomplish this goal.
Highlights:
Decapod v0.7 will be available end of November 2012 and will feature:
Decapod 0.7 is the current release.
Features include:
This project itself will not be producing a pre-assembled purchasable package. Instead the Decapod software will be freely downloadable and the compliant hardware components readily available at retail stores. This way you can also assemble your own solution depending on your requirements and budget.
To learn more about the equipment required by Decapod, see the Decapod Stereo 3D Equipment Guide wiki page.
Also we do not make any restrictions on the commercialization of the project, so another party may choose to resell a Decapod based product.
We welcome involvement by groups or individuals from the community! Please join the Decapod Google Group and introduce yourself. We are an open community thrilled to have anyone interested join us or just listen in on our mailing lists.
Hand written materials is difficult to OCR due to the variability in written text. Hence for hand written materials, it is recommended to use an image-based format and manually transcribe the content.
Decapod's OCR and font generation functionality is designed to work with Latin based text (i.e. English, French, German). OCR and font generation will not support languages which use non-Latin script such as Chinese, Arabic at this time. For non-Latin languages, Decapod can still be used to generate image-based output, but any option to process the text content will give unpredictable results.
In following with the spirit of the project grant, the project will only deal with small to medium-sized material. Thus if gatefolds are encountered, they should be omitted and noted, or be captured as multiple separate images. Along this line, Decapod will not be dealing with large books at this time.
Depending on the export formats and options chosen, Decapod will preserve the colour of the original content. However, certain options can only be output as black and white such as font-generated or traced PDF, thus photos or diagrams may not be preserved.
There has been a lot of interest in capturing three-dimensional objects into a digital form. To start, Decapod will not be addressing this use case but we do acknowledge its immense application.
If this is a priority for your institution, then we welcome participation in extending Decapod as the project proceeds.
Decapod's calibration and dewarping process require sufficient resources to perform well. The current recommended system for Decapod consists of:
Decapod requires two identical cameras, mounted on a tripod, and connected via USB cables to the system. Decapod will require control of the two cameras, and in our testing we have found that not every brand and model is suitable.
For more information about the cameras required for Decapod, please see the Decapod Stereo 3D Equipment Guide.
Lighting is very critical to achieving good results with Decapod. If there is sufficient ambient light, then additional lighting is not required to use Decapod. However, in some situations users may want to employ flashes, diffusers, or other lighting to improve results.
For general inquiries, please post to the Decapod Google Group.
The following section is intended to help community members get up and running with working on the Decapod project.
If you're new to Decapod, a good place to start is to read the executive overview of the Decapod grant document.
Once you're ready, you can dive into:
Decapod is a distributed project with members across the globe (Germany, Bulgaria, USA, and Canada), so we use a cocktail of different technologies to keep in touch across locations.
There are regularly scheduled meetings: