🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi, I am trying to get any pointers regrading the following and
wondering anyone knows of something that could help me. I have checked
with the graphics people (Profs.Derose and Salesin) but they did not
seem to know of any work that was related to what I want.

        When you photo-copy a book, the page(s) being copied
        donot sit flat on the copier/scanner. Thus the text near
        the fold of the book gets skewed and also turns out darker
        due to the light entering thru the gap. Futhermore, you must have
        noticed that the fonts near the fold are blurred. 
        This is a basic graphics problem where a texture (the text) is on a
        non-planar surface is being imaged. Foley, Van Dam, et. al
        have a description of that. Although, I will need to
        handle the light intensity and defocus problem. 

Do you know of literature that addresses these problems? i.e. give a
description of how the modelling of the book pages could be done? Any
literature from either virtual reality/graphics/physics will be
helpful.

The reason for looking into this problem is document understanding.
To evaluate the performance of a document understanding system, we
need to perform controlled experiments with degraded documents.
Currently the degraded documents are real scanned documents.  This
eats up space, kills grad students who scan the documents (the number
of documents that have to be scanned is very large).  If we can
generate noisy documents, using a valid model, lot of time and effort
can be saved, during the algorithm developement stage. A final check,
of course, will have to be done on real, scanned, documents.

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,

Tapas 

PS: I was at Xerox, Palo Alto, for a DARPA Workshop, and I asked one
of their staff about models for Xerox copiers. He said it was
proprietary.