Multiview Rectification of Folded Documents

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2018 Feb;40(2):505-511. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2017.2675980. Epub 2017 Mar 2.

Abstract

Digitally unwrapping images of paper sheets is crucial for accurate document scanning and text recognition. This paper presents a method for automatically rectifying curved or folded paper sheets from a few images captured from multiple viewpoints. Prior methods either need expensive 3D scanners or model deformable surfaces using over-simplified parametric representations. In contrast, our method uses regular images and is based on general developable surface models that can represent a wide variety of paper deformations. Our main contribution is a new robust rectification method based on ridge-aware 3D reconstruction of a paper sheet and unwrapping the reconstructed surface using properties of developable surfaces via conformal mapping. We present results on several examples including book pages, folded letters and shopping receipts.