Filed under: Digitization
I tried out the Snapter demo recently. Snapter is an intriguing piece of software that aims to ease the digitization of books, magazines, whiteboard photos, etc. You photograph your page with a digital camera, feed it into Snapter, and boom, you are presented with a beautiful PDF… or that is the idea. In practice, things don’t seem to work so well.
I photographed a magazine (about 50 pages). Then ran them through Snapter. The interface and workflow are still a little rough, but the more fundamental problem is the page detection. The program is suppose to detect the edges of the page. Using this information, it can than warp the image to deal with things like page curl, or crooked photos. On most pages, it wasn’t even close, comically so. The page detection algorithm appears to just look for high contrast and forgets that a the edge of a page is almost always a straight line, or close to a straight line. To add insult to injury, the interface gives you the opportunity to correct the page detection by dragging the handles to the true edge, however, when dragging the handles, it would refuse to move where I dragged the cursor.
The above photo is an example of Snapter doing a decent job of page detection thanks to the very simple layout of the pages, with high contrast between the page and the background. It has correctly found the center of the magazine (yellow vertical line). The red line has a minor blip on the lower left, and also didn’t quite find the left side. I imagine, it would do a decent job on a book with no color and no photos or illustrations.
On this set of pages, Snapter fails miserably. These pages are trickier than above, but there are still distinct page edges. Snapter has made comical wavy lines desperately trying to find the edge. Attempts to drag the handles to the true page edges is mostly ignored and just ends in frustration.
On top of these issues, Snapter is overpriced (for a consumer application) at $50 and only available for Windows. Here’s hoping for Snapter 3 soon.
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