We recovered 575k crop labels from a decade of manual Photoshop work to automate book digitization - more data, ResNet-50, and higher resolution all failed; ten operator clicks per book beat them [P]

Excerpt

Author here. Ibteda Digital Library is a private community archive in Pakistan — for ten years we digitized rare Urdu books (lithographs, dictionaries, periodicals) on a DIY camera rig, finishing every page by hand in Photoshop. When we wound down daily operations, I realized those 575,729 finished pages across 1,765 books recorded a decade of crop decisions, so I registered them back to their raw photos (SIFT + MAGSAC with conservative acceptance gates) and used the recovered geometry as superv