They Taught Robots How To Read Closed Books, Are We Going To Regret Because Of That?

This technology can already be directly applied to extract the contents of the old and historical books and documents, that could be damaged by touching.

Researchers from the University of MIT and Georgia Tech's managed to teach robots to read a closed book.

Specifically, they develop special imaging algorithms and mechanical means which robots can learn to read books even if they are closed.

In their recently published work, they use terahertz radiation or electromagnetic radiation technology and infrared light and microwaves to scan pages in the book and recognize letters.

The camera captures the radiation of book and produces various signals pointing to a place where there is a void or print in color, and at the end it goes to the processing algorithm to distinguish the individual letters.

The aforementioned algorithm is successfully reading nine of 20 pages of text.

According to the Inverse, a researcher Barmac Heshmat explained that the signal from the deeper pages is weaker.

The article points that the technology that uses this algorithm is smart enough to beat CAPTCHA system that is based on the text, or to use "dictionary" of the possible letters in order to design things.

This helps to "make the invisible visible," and this technology is particularly appealing to anyone who wants to digitize books.

Alireza Aghasi from MIT says that the attempt to read books using electromagnetic waves is extremely demanding because it can always cause overlapping letters. But no matter, this technology can already be directly applied to extract the contents of the old and historical books and documents, which could be damaged by touching.

One of the possibilities provided by the algorithm is the removal of parts, or letters, from a website, and, like puzzles, try designing things that are best for their appearance. It is interesting that this is the greatest threat for captcha technology because robots with the new algorithm can constantly recognize the signs with whom they met earlier.

While the list of other consequences of this discovery is still being collected, the researchers have already announced that future devices will have a more precise reading skills, and to be able to "penetrate" through multiple layers of paper.