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.
!unmodified (Score:3, Interesting)
In the article it says that they use an unmodified scanner, but later on they claim to control the lights of the scanner individually... how is this not modifing the hardware?
Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite so... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
And for it to work at all, you would need a 2-lamp scanner.
Which are standard, but in high-quality print studios and other places that would do this kind of retouching by hand anyway in order to preserve or achieve better quality of the final product.
Re:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Book valley detection (Score:3, Interesting)
Xerox did this already a few years back. And Google does it for their book scanning by projecting a laser grid and determining the 3d surface curvature of the book.
Re:Book valley detection (Score:1, Interesting)
Atiz makes consumer (simple, cheap) and professional (more options, expensive) software to do this, and they also sell the hardware (though you can just use a scanner or camera+tripod).
It actually works pretty well. The only caveat is that you must frame the photos to meet their specifications (e.g. need a solid background border around the book being photographed). It is also pretty slow to process several hundred pages...
http://snapter.atiz.com
http://www.atiz.com/
Re:Uses of multiple light sources (Score:2, Interesting)
There will soon be much less need for 3D from 2D hacks, because there's a new technology coming that produces 3D pictures directly: Time-of-flight cameras [wikipedia.org]. Today they are really expensive but they're going to become much cheaper very soon. This is what XBox's Project Natal is based on.
Re:Doesn't restore photographs (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's stupid. A traditional print is made from a negative or slide, so by your purist philosophy, restoring the print isn't actually restoring "the photograph." Digital images are photographs and vice versa. What matters is the image, not the medium it is presented on.
Your idea of the photograph would be considered silly and outdated by the photographers of 50 years ago.