Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

snapclean.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#51

Post by GFischer »

acid_bath wrote: post #13

I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the returned image was. My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer thou…

Ahh... that's the nice thing.

Customers don't need to know how easy (or hard) something is... some classmates of mine are now enjoying a trip to South Africa (to see the World Cup alongside head coach Óscar Tabárez) thanks to some clever marketing... they made a video indexing software (the indexing is totally manual) and marketed it as a solution for soccer trainers.

The actual code was much easier than our own project, but it was visually nice and it was brilliantly marketed. I'm probably going to blog about this if some of you are interested :)

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#52

Post by csarva »

Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice. Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times.

Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved somewhere to make searching my email easier.

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#54

Post by Gormo »

This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good.

The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights.

Here is my before and after for comparison:

Before: http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#55

Post by chollida1 »

Gormo wrote: post #54

This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good. The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights. Here is my before and after for comparison: Before: http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg

The links you posted don't work for me. I get a 404.

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#56

Post by Gormo »

chollida1 wrote: post #55
Gormo wrote: post #54

This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good. The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights. Here is my before and after for comparison: Before: http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg After: http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg

The links you posted don't work for me. I get a 404.

Changed to imgur links; try now.

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#57

Post by kyleburton »

ars wrote: post #53

Why does it resale the image? I sent a 640x411 image and got back a 800x514 Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried was http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg - and yes I know it's not a whiteboard, but it looks like one.)

Sorry, I'm rescaling the image right now to roughly 800x600 to keep down on the memory usage of the process. Based on what I'm seeing today I think I can raise the maximum picture size and not rescale if it's within that size. Thanks for giving it a try.

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#58

Post by kyleburton »

csarva wrote: post #52

Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice. Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times. Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if…

Glad to know it worked on glass whiteboards - would you be willing to share a pic? I like the idea of preserving the subject line - make it easier to organize the photos when they come back (my camera doesn't let me give them meaningful names). Great idea! Thanks for trying it out.

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#59

Post by kyleburton »

jsb wrote: post #50

It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version back. Boom, done. Don't know how f…

Thanks for the suggestions. I had thought of a couple of things: simple 90/-90 rotations, removing red eye was one of them - I have to figure out an automated way of doing that. Thanks for checking it out!

Re: New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email

#60

Post by kyleburton »

albemuth wrote: post #42

Here's a before and after test, looks like it needs some tuning for images that are not as low contrast http://sprng.me/154k6 p.s. that's a springpad link, awesome to just share those stuff from your phone

Thank you for the example. Looks like something could be tweaked to do better on that kind of picture. Would you be willing to let me use that as an example for trying to improve the algorithm? Thanks again for trying the service.
Post reply on HN