Here’s something we never thought of: John Fisher is using an EiBotBoard (EBB), a Raspberry PI and a camera to create “inverse panorama views” of cylindrical objects. It’s a little bit like using an Eggbot as a scanner. His in-depth article covers everything from hardware set up to code.
Hat tip to EBB developer Brian Schmalz for pointing us to this one!
Antiquarians use something like this, except with a slit lens, to record old ceramics and the like. You’ve probably seen some of their pottery “unwinds” in books on ancient art.
They use a mechanical link to rotate the object and to advance the film in sync. You could probably do this with digital, a stepping motor, and a gear linkage, especially if you can just read a limited number of rows at each step.
That is a really neat idea. A while ago, I’d written a wee program in VB6 to do slit-scan images using a webcam; I dug it out again and tried it with objects on a turntable. The results are pretty good – see http://imajeenyus.com/computer/20130113_rotary_slit_scanner/index.shtml
for some (rather bad) photos.
Slit scan images are weird – only moving objects show up in them, and everything else is “smeared out”.