Undoing page curl distortion using applicable surfaces

This work is concerned with the reconstruction of the flat state of a curled document or book page when captured face up by a camera. It is reconstructed with the support of sparse depth measurements of its surface. A novel method based on physical modeling of paper deformation with an applicable surface is proposed and a relaxation algorithm is described that allows us to fit this model and unroll it to a plane so as to produce the undistorted document. Some very promising results are shown that confirm that the use of applicable surfaces is the right way to address this problem