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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.
Won't this ruin my collection of photographs of creased paper?
I was hoping they were using that 3D information to do something interesting to actually restore the image. They're not.
They're basically using rudimentary 3D information that they can get out of the scanner to determine that a crease exists. They then remove it with a simple infill algorithm, which is as basic as it gets (although it often works ok), and which you can find in most image editing software. It's no coincidence that the example image they use has a crease going over mostly similarly colored and low-detail areas.
So what they're doing is not an improvement to restoration, it's just an improvement to defect detection. Basically, it saves you having to tell the software where the defect to be fixed is, the fixing is the same quality as it's always been.
--Joakim Ziegler
What we really need is a copy machine/scanner that can detect the valley formed by the spine of a book being copied and automatically correct for it. That would be worth it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
...and it suddenly dawns on everyone exactly why Archon V2.0 failed in his childhood dream to become a lyricist...
This guy's the limit!