Decapod Roadmap

Table of Contents

Definitions

"Good Quality Source Material"

• segmented: distinguish lines and characters

• high enough contrast to detect characters

• skew should be corrected automatically or in the Decapod UI

Application Architecture

Hardware and image capture

• Two cameras

• Book flattening and camera alignment hardware

• Capture UX

or

• Flatbed scanner

• Folder full of images

or

• Single camera

• SD card

• Folder full of images

• or import UI for importing images from an SD card

Book Editing and Management Application

• Import images

• Reorder pages

• Delete pages

• Crop

• Rotation correction/skew

• Basic book metadata

• (Contrast controls)

• (Image annotation)

PDF Generation Pipeline

• Dewarping

• Binarization

• OCR

• PDF generation

Decapod Minimum Viable Application 1.0

• Import images

• Export:

  • Good quality image-based PDF

  • Searchable text in PDF

  • Text is selectable, screen readable, and extractable

  • Font matching

Supplementary Features

• Reorder pages

• Delete pages

• Basic book metadata (i.e. Dublin core fields)

Incremental Design/Development Roadmap

Decapod 0.5a

• For good quality source material, produce a PDF with:

  • Good image quality

  • Searchable text

  • Selectable, extractable text

Decapod 0.5

• New UI for importing a folder full of images (e.g. from a flat bed scanner)

• Polish export UI

• See Decapod 0.5 Planning

Decapod 0.6 (Full-featured Export to PDF)

Import / Export UI

• More export options: dimensions, DPI, colour depth, OCR text file output

• Report export status on the Exporter: make use of JSON status file

• TIFF output

Server

• Add support for new genpdf features

• Make use of genpdf JSON status file

• Report errors better (there are some generic errors)

Client and Server

• Make UI respond meaningfully to server error messages.

  • Requires some design.

Infrastructure

• Possible update to Ocropus 0.5

• Possible update to Ubuntu 12.04

ETA: 6 weeks (July 20th 2012)

• More detailed Decapod 0.6 planning

Decapod 0.7

• DSLR controlled within Decapod's user interface using gphoto

  • Detect attached camera.

  • Take a photo and transfer over USB to disk.

• Implementation of Stereo Capture

  • Physical rig for mounting two cameras sufficiently for stereo dewarping

  • Calibration UI

• Stereo Capture UI

  • Cameras are checked: matching pair of supported cameras.

  • Cameras are calibrated using the Calibration UI.

  • User captures pairs of images and they are saved to disk.

  • Once done capturing, a ZIP file is created with all the stereo images and the calibration data.

• Stereo Dewarp UI

  • Upload a ZIP file containing stereo pair of images and calibration data, and generate a de-warped image to disk.

  • User is prompted to download the ZIP file.

• Structured light UI

  • Physical rig for mounting a camera on top of a projector

  • Calibration and capture UI

• Better Error handling across all components

• See Decapod 0.7 Planning

Things to Consider in the Future

• Metadata

  • basic book metadata

  • fancy dublin core, etc.

• Annotation

  • Text alternatives to images

  • translations

  • Scholarly annotations

  • Tagging

• New page management user interfaces

  • Deleting

  • Reordering

  • Cropping

  • Rotation

  • Undo Delete

  • Undo Crop, Rotation, Reordering

  • Redo Delete

  • Redo Crop, Rotation, Reordering

  • Ability to mark page boundaries within a single image of a two-page spread

• Book management

  • The ability to manage and work concurrently on more than one book at a time

  • Create, organize, delete

  • Edit information about the book (name, basic metadata, etc.)

  • Schedule books for export