Whiteboard Picture Cleaner - Shell one-liner/script to clean up and beautify photos of whiteboards!

whiteboardCleaner.md

Description

This simple script will take a picture of a whiteboard and use parts of the ImageMagick library with sane defaults to clean it up tremendously.

The script is here:

#!/bin/bash
convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"

Results

Here are some of the input images:

And here are the results:

Usage

Assuming it's saved as a file named whiteboardClean.sh, the command is ./whiteboardClean.sh {name of input file} {name of file to output to}.

Here's an example:

./whiteboardClean.sh example1.jpg output1.png

How I Came Up With This

I was doing a lot work with whiteboards and I'd been taking pictures of them to document what had been written. I wanted a more clean version of the pictures though, something that captured the essence of what a whiteboard image showed.

Eventually I found this excellent guide to cleaning up whiteboard photos using GIMP. However, I found I wanted more automation. So, I spent a few hours yesterday figuring out how to do the same thing using ImageMagick from the command line and made this script.

Awesome idea!