Active Flattening of Curved Document Images via Two Structured Beams

Document images captured by a digital camera often suffer from serious geometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an active method to correct geometric distortions in a camera-captured document image. Unlike many passive rectification methods that rely on text-lines or features extracted from images, our method uses two structured beams illuminating upon the document page to recover two spatial curves. A developable surface is then interpolated to the curves by finding the correspondence between them. The developable surface is finally flattened onto a plane by solving a system of ordinary differential equations. Our method is a content independent approach and can restore a corrected document image of high accuracy with undistorted contents. Experimental results on a variety of real-captured document images demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.