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.

has anyone here used this workflow in the 'magick' package in R?
I can't replicate the last bit because I can't figure out how the -level operator was implemented

Hello everyone,

Anyone know how to apply this Whiteboard script for swift or objective C Or any other way to use in iOS?

oooh wauwie !!! I have been looking for this method for hundreds of years ;-) thanks man!!

Hello everyone,

Anyone know how to apply this Whiteboard script for swift or objective C Or any other way to use in iOS?

Let me know please, If you will find anything. Thanks.

👏

I'm getting an error :

convert: ../../magick/quantum.c:216: DestroyQuantumInfo: Assertion `quantum_info != (QuantumInfo *) NULL' failed.
scanner.sh: line 2:     9 Aborted                 (core dumped) convert "$1" -morphology Convolve DoG:15,100,0 -negate -normalize -blur 0x1 -channel RBG -level 60%,91%,0.1 "$2"

I use Ubuntu WSL for Windows 10 and installed the library obviously (ImageMagick). I tried it on a 32000*27000 png image (max format for PNG fyi).

I would also prefer to use it on my initial PDF but it seems it does not work?

Okay, the PNG error is not corrected but I finally found out how to use it on my PDF using this link : https://alexvanderbist.com/posts/2018/fixing-imagick-error-unauthorized

I had a "Unauthorized" error so I nanoed a config file.

I ran this script in a corporate unix environment and it works great. Just rather slow.
Great job, thank you.

I had converted the above ImageMagick commands to OpenCV Python with some adjustments for white-board image enhancement.
If any one interested for Python implementation, find the script in white_board_enhance github repo.

So damn cool!