Flattening curved documents in images

Compared to scanned images, document pictures captured by camera can suffer from distortions due to perspective and page warping. It is necessary to restore a frontal planar view of the page before other OCR techniques can be applied. In this paper we describe a novel approach for flattening a curved document in a single picture captured by an uncalibrated camera. To our knowledge this is the first reported method able to process general curved documents in images without camera calibration. We propose to model the page surface by a developable surface, and exploit the properties (parallelism and equal line spacing) of the printed textual content on the page to recover the surface shape. Experiments show that the output images are much more OCR friendly than the original ones. While our method is designed to work with any general developable surfaces, it can be adapted for typical special cases including planar pages, scans of thick books, and opened books.