This is (the beginnings of) a little script to process photos of handwritten notes and make them better for viewing/reproduction.

Currently, it does two things:

1. Tries to detect a sheet of paper against a background, and then automatically crop and perform a perspective correction.
2. Applies an adaptive thresholding function to posterize the image, giving black writing on white background.

Todo

1. The dewarping is somewhat broken, in the following ways:

   • It assumes that the sheet will always be on a differently-coloured background, which may not be true.
   • It assumes that the sheet is 8.5*11 instead of trying to determine its true aspect ratio.

2. The file handling is really brittle and only works enough to test the image processing.

3. The output is saved as an 8bit greyscale png, when it is really only 1bit data.

Creating PDFs

You can create a PDF from the processed images using Graphicsmagick:

gm convert p_*.png document.pdf