The powerful, fast & free book scanner

Give your books
the digital life
they deserve.

From your phone camera to a curated, searchable PDF At your desk, in the library, or wherever you are. No flatbed, no bulky rig: just you, your laptop and your phone.

Download for macOS Read the docs →

Linux and Windows versions coming soon…

Tip the developer

You don't have to settle
for crufty book photos.

You don't have to endure endless flatbed scanning sessions either.

Curved pages, skew, perspective, uneven illumination,
and dozens of issues that make you go « eewww… » when you look at your documents.
Aglaïa turns the camera and the laptop you already have into a proper scanner.
All automatic. Fully customizable.

3 scanning challenges,
1 standard pipeline to rule them all…

The following examples were all run with default settings. No fiddling needed.

A book spread photographed at a desk under overhead light.
The same spread after Aglaïa: two flat, deskewed, dewarped pages.
before after
Easy mode 😁 at a desk with overhead lights
A book spread under uneven light — one page in shadow, the other bright.
The same spread after Aglaïa: even, clean, binarized text edge to edge.
before after
Medium mode 🤨 on a library chair, uneven illumination
A thick book whose pages curl steeply into the spine.
The same spread after Aglaïa: the curl flattened, baselines straight.
before after
Hard mode 😭 thick book, extreme page curl

A powerful pipeline architecture

Whether you're scanning books, spiral-bound reports, or loose sheets of paper, there's a specially curated pipeline for you.

Capture / Import

Point your phone or webcam at the page and shoot — hands-free with voice control, no flatbed, no app-switching. Already have files? Import your PDFs and images straight in.

Process

Isolate the text content, straighten it, and remove perspective and page-curvature distortion. Make your text pop with advanced binarization techniques.

Read

Fast and coarse or slow and precise; local (Apple Vision, Surya, PaddleOCR-VL) or cloud-based (Mistral OCR) — Aglaïa takes care of your needs.

Export

A clean, searchable PDF for your digital archives or printouts? A well-structured Markdown file to feed your favorite LLM workflows? Aglaïa gives you what you need.

Scan anywhere with the continuity camera

Put your phone on your desk, your book on a chair, et voilà !

With a typical capacity of 2–4 pages processed per second and a sub-2 seconds latency per scan, you may not turn the pages fast enough to overwhelm Aglaïa.

Overhead diagram: a person at a laptop, an iPhone on a stand acting as the camera, pointed at an open book propped on a chair.

How much resolution do you want? — Yes!

Smart replay — no iterative distortion.

Deskew, keystone correction and dewarp each resample the image. Chain them naïvely and every pass softens and warps the pixels a little more — glyph edges crumble.

Aglaïa keeps track of the operations and at the end composes the perfect blend of geometric and morphological transforms to give you the sharpest result.

Text glyphs degraded and jagged from repeated per-step resampling.
Sequential processing
The same glyphs, crisp and clean, from a single replayed warp.
Smart replay

Watch a page take shape.

Every stage is persisted, inspectable and replayable.

Layout detection boxes the two pages of the spread and splits them.
1 · Detect — split the spread into pages
The page binarized: crisp black text on white.
2 · Binarize — crisp black on white
Trapezoidal keystone correction with the fitted column quad overlaid.
3 · Keystone — remove perspective
Page dewarp flattens the curved sheet and straightens the baselines.
4 · Dewarp — flatten page curvature
The final clean rectified page, ready for OCR and export.
5 · Done — straight, clean, ready for OCR

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Simple, but not simplistic

Unleash the computer-vision and data-science nerd within you.

Full CLI automation

Run the end-to-end pipeline from the command line.

Versatile plugin system

The task at hand gets specific? Build your own processing elements in Python.

Freedom to choose

Have a favorite OCR provider? Need to export to cloud storage? Write your own adapters.

# clone, then sync with the extras you want
git clone https://github.com/yb85/aglaia.git && cd aglaia

uv sync --extra gui --extra macos   # macOS GUI: Vision, Speech, MLX dewarp
# add any of:
#   --extra jbig2    # smallest searchable PDFs (JBIG2 encoder, needs Rust)
#   --extra cloud    # Mistral cloud OCR
#   --extra cuda     # NVIDIA GPU dewarp (Linux)

uv run python aglaia.py ~/scans/my-book
# add the Aglaïa tap, then install the app
brew tap yb85/aglaia https://github.com/yb85/aglaia
brew install --cask aglaia

Digitize your shelf.

Free, source-available*, and yours to extend.

Download for macOS Star on GitHub

* PolyForm Shield License 1.0.0