Plug in power and USB cable to the scanner, and connect it to your computer.

Check SANE is installed, then run sane-find-scanner , and it should list your scanner. From Benq's page get the Mirascan ZIP file. Note that Benq's webservers are crap, and they cut out mid-download, so save yourself frustration by using wget to take care of the downloading/resuming/retrying, by doing:
wget ftp://211.78.86.204/scanner/drivers/usb/mirascanv403u10_bqa.zip

and/or
wget http://benq.co.uk/support/downloads/download.cfm? file=scanner/drivers/usb/mirascanv403u10_bqa.zip

Check the ZIP file downloaded okay by doing:

unzip -t mirascanv403u10_bqa.zip

... and making sure it says there were "no errors detected" at the end. Extract just the u176v046.bin file (which is firmware blob that this scanner needs to operate) into the current directory:
unzip -j mirascanv403u10_bqa.zip "MiraScan v4.03u10_BQA/BIN/u176v046.bin"

Set up Sane to use this firmware blob:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/sane/snapscan sudo cp u176v046.bin /usr/share/sane/snapscan/ sudo gedit /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf

... and change the first line from:

firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/your-firmwarefile.bin

to:
firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/u176v046.bin

... then save and close the file. Then under the Applications -> Graphics menu, run Xsane, or (my preference) Simple Scan.