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from the whiteboards-never-looked-so-good dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow5743
Microsoft's Pix sets itself apart from other camera apps by using the power of artificial intelligence to correct your photos, learning new tricks over time. It can do things like add artistic flair to your images, turn photos shot in a row into "Live Images," or just making sure the people in your photos look great. This week, the app got a new update out that adds yet another AI trick to the pile: The ability to capture whiteboards and turn them into useful images.
So, for example, if you're at an important meeting, you can use Pix to take a photo of a diagram on the whiteboard to remember it later. The Pix app will then sharpen the focus, ramp up the color and tone, crop out the background and realign the image appropriately so that the diagram is shown straight-on.
According to Microsoft:
The updated app automatically detects whiteboards, documents and business cards in real time and intelligently adjusts camera settings for these types of photos. Once the shutter clicks, the app uses AI to improve the image, such as cropping edges, boosting color and tone, sharpening focus and tweaking the angle to render the image in a straight-on perspective.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/15/microsoft-pix-uses-ai-to-make-whiteboard-photos-useable-images/
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday September 18 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)
I could use that app - although, (without reading the article), I would not be surprised if the whiteboard image is uploaded to Microsoft servers, processed there, and the reprocessed image sent back, giving Three-Letter Agencies an opportunity to have a look. I'm either overly paranoid or cynical. Or both.
Many, many years ago, I attended a large number of whiteboarding sessions on Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The conference rooms were equipped with things that looked like mini-projectors, but were in fact cameras which could take a greyscale picture of whiteboards and produce a thermal-paper print out (probably using a re-purposed fax-machine printer) of what you have drawn/written (so long as you used dark pen colours). They were neat, but even at that time, I found using my digital camera a better option. Imagemagick can do everything mentioned in the article extract above (when driven by an expert - maybe AI us useful here), but one thing where AI might be more useful is converting hastily scrawled rectangles and other shapes into neat geometric shapes with intelligent, properly labelled connectors. Something that takes hours if you do it ab initio in Visio or any other drawing package (e.g. LibreOffice Draw).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday September 18 2017, @06:59PM
Cyranoid?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.