23 Jun
2001
23 Jun
'01
8:07 a.m.
At 03:30 PM 6/22/01 -0700, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I started to... I stuck the punch card in the sleeve my
sheet-feed Brother
scanner comes with for torn pages, and backed it with a piece of colored
paper for contrast through the holes.
Scanners? Who needs them? I think it should be possible to
do this with webcams. See Digimarc's watermarking technology
at http://www.digimarc.com/mediabridge/index.htm . Hold a
magazine ad up to your camera, it reads the watermark, and
the software directs you to a web page. Tell me you couldn't
write software that recognizes a punch card... the info
density is quite low, per-card, and there's just so much
right-angle-ness to the problem that it seems quite doable.
Just imagine a program that recognizes punched cards as you
hold them up, one at a time, before a webcam.
- John