Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#1

Post by lelandbatey » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line
gist.github.com

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#2

Post by Synergyse » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 2:32 AM UTC

Nice idea, would it be possible to do some OCR at the end?

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#3

Post by kschua » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 2:35 AM UTC

Nice idea. It would be fantastic if this could be done on the phone during the image capture

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#4

Post by BorisMelnik » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 2:35 AM UTC

very nice, never experimented with modifying images via command line but was able to understand the process via shell parameters.

also photos of whiteboards always come out terrible, this cleans them up nicely.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#5

Post by NamTaf » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 2:55 AM UTC

Great work, thanks heaps for this! This'll help me clean up files quickly and easily, as we do the same thing a lot of the time too :)

NB: This works fine on the Windows version of ImageMagick, however if (like me) you want to wrap it in a batch file you must escape the -level command by changing the "60%,91%,0.1" to "60%%,91%%,0.1" or else the batch file will misinterpret it, since %1 refers to variable names (the same as bash scripts). If you don't, you'll just get a black PNG file.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#6

Post by NamTaf » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 2:57 AM UTC

kschua wrote: post #3

Nice idea. It would be fantastic if this could be done on the phone during the image capture

There's a whole heap of iOS 'scanning' apps that do this sort of thing device-side.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#7

Post by ollyfg » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 3:04 AM UTC

Looks much better than the original photos.

On a slightly related note, camscanner, an app for android (and IOS?) does something similar, but can also correct for the angle at which the photo was taken (I think it has to detect squares/rectangles in the photo). Does anyone know if this is possible using the command line too?

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#8

Post by avmich » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 3:13 AM UTC

Over here - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/j-language - there is discussion in the video of removal of the background.

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#9

Post by contingencies » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 3:45 AM UTC

ollyfg wrote: post #7

Looks much better than the original photos. On a slightly related note, camscanner, an app for android (and IOS?) does something similar, but can also correct for the angle at which the photo was taken (I think it has to detect squares/rectangles in the photo). Does anyone know if this is possible using the command line too?

Maybe have a look at http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/distorts/

Re: Show HN: Digitizing photos of whiteboards using the command line

#10

Post by contingencies » Thu, Apr 03, 2014, 3:48 AM UTC

Synergyse wrote: post #2

Nice idea, would it be possible to do some OCR at the end?

Take a look at Tesseract, which last time I looked was the best codebase to use in this area. It's part of Google's open source multilingual OCR suite, which is in two parts (layout analysis and actual OCR code being segregated): https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/