HP Restores Creased Photos With Flatbed Scanners

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at HP have developed a technique to detect creases in photographs using standard, unmodified flatbed scanners. Once correctly scanned into a computer, software can determine where the photograph's defect is, and artificially correct it to remove any trace of a crease or fold. The result is a spotless JPEG scan from a creased photo, with absolutely no modified hardware and no technical know-how required on the part of the user." They're using multiple light sources to do this, in a way that reminds me of last year's description of 3D image creation using an ordinary digital camera.

Comments

Doesn't restore photographs

[BetterSense]

This does nothing to restore creased photographs. What it does is scan the photograph, manipulate the digital image obtained, so that you can print out the image onto another piece of paper. This is not restoring the photograph. The photograph still has a crease in it.

As a practitioner of traditional photography, I'm annoyed to no end by people who talk as if the concepts of "photograph" and "image" were one and the same. Photographs are unique physical objects that have mass. Speaking as if photographs are digital images is like speaking as if symphonies are .mp3 files.