Off topic, but as OP is from the .it TLD, it’s interesting to note OP prefers riga pasta, especially in light of this article: https://qz.com/1811768/coronavirus-lockdown-ignites-an-old-i...
(unipi.it: University of Pisa)
Poor man's document camera for videoconference
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#42Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#43Reminds me a kickstarter project I backed years ago called ScanBox. I still pull it out from time to time to scan documents when traveling, and have used it once or twice for a live document scanner, though the sides of the box make it difficult to get your hand into. These days our team either uses the built-in whiteboard functionality in Zoom, or jump into a Google Drawing or Slides document for the live collaborat…
Had to look this up, neat: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-... Bonus points if someone can sell this feature within a notebook/tablet stand. Modifying a tiny tower stand ( https://tinytowerstand.com/ ) comes to mind.
That‘s a really cool idea, does not need much space when not used :)
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Android there's an option to lock orientation.
I believe it is either "force portrait" or "autorotate", there is no "force landscape".
From Android 10 or maybe 9 on the side of the soft keys bar appears a little rotation icon when you flip the device.
Found the explanation: https://9to5google.com/2018/03/07/android-p-rotation-button-...
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#45Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#46In these situations where you're taking a photograph of writing or a diagram on a piece of paper, it can be surprisingly tricky to get rid of the shading from the lighting conditions and be left with just the content on the page in high contrast. This explanation nails how to do it though: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#divide Divide a blurred copy by the original and you end up with effectively an adaptiv…
Notes has a good document scanner on iOS - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210336 Google Photoscan mentioned by someone else is also great, it's available on iOS and Android It takes a series of photos, and guides you to move the phone as the document is illuminated from different angles by the led flash. It then blends them for optimal result to eliminate glare
Notes document scanner for iOs is great. I use all the time.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#47In these situations where you're taking a photograph of writing or a diagram on a piece of paper, it can be surprisingly tricky to get rid of the shading from the lighting conditions and be left with just the content on the page in high contrast. This explanation nails how to do it though: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#divide Divide a blurred copy by the original and you end up with effectively an adaptiv…
I really rate Microsoft's free Office Lens for document scanning. It automatically crops and there are a few filters you can experiment with to get the best result and the output to PDF or whatever. iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-office-lens-pdf-scan... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....
I have had good success with the document scanning built into iOS. For some reason it's buried within the Notes application.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#48> "With so many people and students around the world working from home, we really need some easy to deploy shared whiteboard solution. This is especially important for pre-college students who may not have access to high end hardware."
Just add a new mode to videoconferencing, where both parties get a white screen and both can start drawing and the resulting image stays in sync on both clients? (I feel like this solution is so obvious, I'm about to fly out a window - what am I missing?)
Sounds like way less work for those already developing videoconferencing apps than to deploy stand-alone solutions in addition to that.
In fact, phones could do good just having a "scratchpad" as a "phone-variant" of Notepad and/or Paint. It helps to quickly draw something, a simple sketch, or communication with deaf people or those who don't share a common language.
It's sad to see the state of bloatware on phones and not seeing many useful things. It took ages for them to add the torch/flashlight feature as a standard into the OS, back in the day, we needed to use apps to get that done, so I think it's probably symptomatic of the entire industry.
Hell, it's no wonder Apple can get away selling their expensive stuff, the others aren't really setting the bar high enough...
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#49In these situations where you're taking a photograph of writing or a diagram on a piece of paper, it can be surprisingly tricky to get rid of the shading from the lighting conditions and be left with just the content on the page in high contrast. This explanation nails how to do it though: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#divide Divide a blurred copy by the original and you end up with effectively an adaptiv…
Most commercial solutions solve this by using bright illumination from both sides to avoid shadows. In a pinch a couple of led under-cupboard light strips off would probably work. Something like: https://www.interactive-education.co.uk/product/visualisers/... It's almost always easier to control the illumination in the first place rather than fix it in post.
In the real world the "bright illumination from both sides" solution is called a makeup mirror. Just get one of those and glue the phone to it.
Re: Poor man's document camera for videoconference
#50Thank you HN for this article and the comments.
Years ago I wrote a little java command line tool based on BoofCV (Pure Java CV lib - https://boofcv.org/), tess4j (tesseract) and PDFBox to create PDFs with OCR and invisible Text Layer, to make its contents searchable like the OCR Option in PDF X Change Viewer.
I used a combination of Thresholding and deskewing to improve my Documents (e.g. Sauvola, Nick) - see https://boofcv.org/index.php?title=Example_Thresholding
Now I plan to restore and improve the old code and provide it as open source solution :-) Hope the code still somewhere on my old harddisks.