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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @01:32PM (1 child)
Hey, ease up on posting M$ spam to the site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 18 2017, @06:12PM
we don't want any MS shilling here, skank ho.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Monday September 18 2017, @03:22PM (1 child)
I want a camera app that men can use that would be the equivalent of the snapchat filters that women use.
The women take their selfie and then all their pimples are gone, makeup is magically applied, and cute little dog ears appear.
I would like one that adds a 6-pack, broadens my shoulders, and adds a nice bulge to the crotch.
STEP UP YOUR GAME MS!
(Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 18 2017, @07:28PM
They also tend to use the filter that posts pictures taken 10 years ago before they gained 100 pounds and turned into Gary Busey.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by liberza on Monday September 18 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
This is the sort of stuff you learn how to do in an image processing course, and doesn't really sound like "AI" has much, if anything, to do with it.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday September 18 2017, @07:59PM
This is the sort of stuff you learn how to do in an image processing course, and doesn't really sound like "AI" has much, if anything, to do with it.
If the smartphone/camera back-end processor is doing it without human intervention, then Artificial Intelligence may well be involved.
1) Identify the corners of the trapezoid. Generate virtual ones if they are outside the field of view
2) Apply a geometric transform to transform the trapezoid into a regular quadrilateral, then crop
3) Sharpen up the line boundaries, making sure continuous lines remain continuous
4) Re-map the palette with some intelligent cut-offs to make the whiteboard white, and enhance the colours of the markers.
All of the above is easily done in an image processing workflow, but choosing the right parameters without human intervention is where an AI might be useful.