HP Restores Creased Photos With Flatbed Scanners 125
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.
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Other uses for 3D info (Score:5, Insightful)
The rudimentary 3D info can be used for improving all sorts of scans.
How about...
- Flattening a scan of a book (by the spine)
- Focusing an area that's raised (products like Focus magic [focusmagic.com] assume a section is all out of focus at the same level, whereas a map of the amount of lost focus is possible here).
- Using the above, scanning non-flat items.
- Scanning nearly-flat 3d surfaces.
Add a lens that can vary focus (based on the light differential) and you'd have a good 3D scanner for one side of a mostly-flat item, and a flatbed scanner that wouldn't lose focus on slightly-raised papers.
Book valley detection (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:!unmodified (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Quite so... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the examples shown in the .PDF [hp.com] it seems that it is once again a case of a quick fix that only works on low-res and low detail photos, preferably in single color.
That doesn't seem like a terribly bad thing to me. If you were a professional looking for extremely high-quality results, then yes, you're going to want to spend a lot of time screwing around with things manually on each photo. Even if it's a largely automatic procedure, you'll probably still want to tweak the parameters a little for each photo, including things like brightness, contrast, and hue.
However, there's another real-world application for this sort of thing: someone like my grandmother scanning lots of old pictures that may have been folded, crumpled, or otherwise damaged. Even if it's not giving the highest quality results, if the results are at all better than not processing the photo, then it's probably fine. Without automatic quick fixes, people might either scan it and leave the damage, or decide not to scan it at all. Giving even barely passable results is an improvement.
Re:Doesn't restore photographs (Score:3, Insightful)
P.S:
I probably shouldn't have used the term "purist philosophy" to describe your attitude towards photography in my previous post. Because it is neither pure or philosophy. A more apt description would be "nostalgic shortsightedness" or "ludditism."
The word "photography" at its root, means painting, drawing or writing with light. And "light" is really the key theme, the other root of the word describing "capturing" the light more than anything else. A digital image displayed on a screen that is never printed, fits the definition perfectly, and could be argued to be more "pure" than a print because you are observing the emission of light directly. But I won't argue about purity, because that's a completely irrelevant concept here, as photography was never "pure" to begin with.
I find your attitude to be insulting to photography. What is "traditional photography" anyway? Photography is a science, a craft, and an artform that has always been changing, and always at the cutting edge of technology and culture. Photographers have always been striving for new techniques and tools. To say that there is some "traditional" form that has some kind of purity or superiority to others is ludditism. Do you think that any of the pioneers of traditional photography would shun the digital form, rather than embrace it as a tool?
I say this as a person who has explored your idea of traditional photography for many years, and who still sometimes uses film and darkrooms and cameras that are half a century old. I too, have nostalgia for black-and-white film and beautiful prints. But to say that a digital image is not a photograph, or is some how less worthy, is nonsense.
Why is it that you are so annoyed by people who use "photograph" and "image" interchangeably? They are the same thing. Are you upset by people using language accurately? I think you're suffering from a very misplaced sense of romanticism and nostalgia. That's not good. Imagine if in earlier years, people acted on such romanticism, and decided that the Daguerreotype was the only real photography (it's certainly more "pure" than negatives and prints) and never developed flexible film, 35mm film, rangefinder cameras, SLRs and the like. Where would your traditional photography be now?
Isn't your idea of traditional photography just a bastard stepchild of Daguerre and Talbot? Why aren't you using those metal plates instead of those newfangled films?