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Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

mzucker.github.io

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#22
Great job with that. I've only just started taking notes by hand once again, after being keyboard-only for many years.

In your scenario, since you have assigned "scribes" taking the notes, you might be able to streamline the process with a "smart pen."

There are several on the market. The one I got as a hand-me-down from a family member lets you write dozens of pages of notes, then Bluetooth them to a smartphone app that exports to PDF, Box, Google Drive, etc... Or it can actually copy the notes to the app in real time. Combined with a projector, this might be useful for the other students during class.

It's supposed to be able to OCR the notes, too, but I haven't bothered to figure out how. But there's a cool little envelope icon in the corner of each notebook page that if you put a checkmark on, it will automatically e-mail the page to a pre-designated address.

Again, there are several models on the market. Mine retails for about $100. Notebooks come in about 15 different sizes and cost about the same as a regular quality notebook.

Just some thoughts.

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#23
post #17

I have an observation about scanning documents that results in good quality and smaller files, but I can't satisfactorily explain why it works. Consider these two cases: (1) Scan document at very high resolution as a JPG and then use a third-party program (like Photoshop or whatever) to re-encode the JPG at your preferred low resolution. (2) Scan document at your preferred low resolution as a JPG straight away. Don't…

[deleted]

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#24
post #18

A simpler way of achieving the same thing is to duplicate the layer, blur the top layer heavily, and then set it to "divide".

Really? Do you care to explain? What is the dividend and what is the divisor? Why can dividing a image by its low pass filtered version (or vice versa) be used to "clean up" the image, i.e. subtract the background, find main colors and cluster similar colors with k-means? What if the divisor has pixels near zero?

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup but a project like this would have an empty issue tracker this one not so much ;) (which doesn't mean that it's a bad project or that I wont use it. it means that I will probably start to work on it)

There actually was some activity in three different branches in january: https://github.com/kskyten/noteshrink/network

Yeah on a branch of a fork.

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#26
post #17

I have an observation about scanning documents that results in good quality and smaller files, but I can't satisfactorily explain why it works. Consider these two cases: (1) Scan document at very high resolution as a JPG and then use a third-party program (like Photoshop or whatever) to re-encode the JPG at your preferred low resolution. (2) Scan document at your preferred low resolution as a JPG straight away. Don't…

If you're scanning at a lower resolution, the scanner has fewer samples to work with when trying to make a visual representation of your document. If you scan at a higher resolution, the algorithm could at the very least average together nearby samples. It could also detect sharp lines vs fuzzy borders and decide whether the low-res version has a sharp transition or an averaged color between areas.

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#27
post #20

I wonder if your technique could remove some lines for the paper we use in France [1]. I never really understood why they were so many lines... [1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/815WQQdAHBL...

Is this really standard writing paper? I assume it would be useful for calligraphy or learning how to write (as you can use the subdivision to draw letters to the correct height) but I find it weird for it to be standard issue paper.

I hadn't seen it before, but it seems to be pretty common for French-ruled paper. https://getfrenchbox.com/what-is-french-ruled-paper-seyes-sc...

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#29
I can get seemingly comparable results with a couple of simple operations in Gimp.

Here is a casual job on the first image:

https://i.imgur.com/Sy2rvsU.png

The steps:

1. Duplicate the layer.

2. Gaussian-blur the top layer with big radius, 30+.

3. Put the top layer in "Divide" mode. Now the image is level.

4. Merge the layers together into one.

5. Use Color->Curves to clean away the writing bleeding through from the opposite side of the paper.

6. To approximate the blurred look of Matt Zucker's result, apply Gaussian blur with r=0.8.

Notes:

The unblurred image before step 6 is here: https://i.imgur.com/RbWSUnD.png

Here is approximately the curve used in step 5: https://i.imgur.com/lvfqCNK.png

I suspect Matt worked at a higher resolution; i.e. the posted images are not the original resolution scans or snapshots.

Re: Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)

#30
post #20

I wonder if your technique could remove some lines for the paper we use in France [1]. I never really understood why they were so many lines... [1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/815WQQdAHBL...

Is this really standard writing paper? I assume it would be useful for calligraphy or learning how to write (as you can use the subdivision to draw letters to the correct height) but I find it weird for it to be standard issue paper.

It is. It's called "French-ruled paper" and is the school standard in France. [0]

[0] https://getfrenchbox.com/what-is-french-ruled-paper-seyes-sc...

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