New Scientist turns up a new patent for rapid infrared scanning over at Google Books:
…Bindings cause pages to arch up either side of the spine – bending text and making it hard to interpret. However, last week Google was granted a patent (US 7508978) on an answer to this problem. Its trick is to project an infrared pattern onto the open page spread. This lets a pair of infrared cameras map the three-dimensional shape of the pages by detecting distortion to the pattern. This in turn allows the distortion of the text to be determined – and therefore the degree of correction needed to read it accurately.
Meanwhile, the patent for the infrared Flashing Earring Heartbeat Monitor goes tragically unused:
