Document Archiving Motion Detect Stript

Hi. I have built a script for document archiving. The work cycle is like this:

1. Wait for a certain minimum amount of motion (changing page)
2. Wait for motion to stop (page changed)
3. take photo
4. repeat

The script itself is quite simple. The effort I invested was to use parameters for all timing & detection functions. You can easily tailor the parameters to suit your own requirements.

When the memory card is full I sync with my pc and use a few simple macros to speed up cropping, rotating and renaming the photos.

I had initially intended to build and use the usb cable release but I decided to try motion detection and I am very pleased with it.

All of the necessary documentation is in the script itself, available here on my web site:

www.seanster.com/archdoco

If you have any questions about the script please post them in this thread rather than emailing me directly.

-Sean

Very neat idea, Sean.

kudos, Sean.

Good idea and a nice practical implementation.

Can you give us a bit more of info about the project? (application, number of images, time you will spend scanning etc.)

I am very interested about the workflow of this project, as I have worked a bit on book digitalization, and a similar hack would be a nice low-end replacement for machines that cost several thousands of dollars :-)

Good idea.......Maybe it could be adapted for photo slide copying as well, like move a slide holder between camera and a light.

...
Can you give us a bit more of info about the project? (application, number of images, time you will spend scanning etc.)
...

I am copying any personal paper documents I would normally keep in a box. My goal would be to shred everything I possibly can. I have to keep some originals like contracts and tax papers.

Monthly statements from banks, car insurance, etc.
Manuals for stuff like remote controls, vcr's, tv's.
Images of items like credit cards, passport, driver's license, in case they are lost or stolen.
Whatever else satisfies my OCD :)

I have about a thousand images so far. I will probably do another thousand then stop for a while.

I did about 500 a couple years ago with a slower setup but it wasn't too bad.

I suppose photographing might take about 5 seconds per page. So maybe an hour and a half to do 1000 documents if you have them sitting there ready to go. That time is minor compared to pulling out files, sorting things, reminiscing over old times, and shredding the paper afterward.

I use the photoshop elements importer to bring them in off the sd card. In the organizer I change the filename to "yyyymmdd whatever" (later sorting into appropriate folders). From the organizer I have a marco set up to call the image editor and put me into crop mode. I crop the image and then another macro rotates and saves the image and returns me to the organizer. This part may take 10 seconds, depending on how fussy I am with the cropping or file naming. Count on at least 2 to 3 times longer than the photographing takes.

The images are stored on an encrypted disk on my linux server and can be shared over the lan to my windows pc. If I'm traveling in another country and I lose my ID I can get a hi-rez copy off my website. I have one-time passwords available to access the website so in a pinch I can use internet cafe or hotel pc's and not worry too much about viruses and keyloggers.

Eventually I will do a quick and dirty batch OCR of all images and I'll store the text files under the same name. That should provide easy searching later on.

-Sean

Hi. Bumping this back up to note that this script is still running on the latest CHDK. I ran about 550 pages past my sx210is without issue, except for one line I needed to comment out of the script:

P=get_video_button
REM if P=1 then goto "VideoButtonError"

Just rem that line. It was inherited from an earlier script and may prevent it from working on your camera.

Note that this script isn't just about archiving documents. It provides a generic parameter driven structure for many motion capture scenarios.