
PhotoScan: Taking Glare-Free Pictures of Pictures - stablemap
https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/photoscan-taking-glare-free-pictures-of.html
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nemof
Worth noting that people who were unsatisfied with the low res results of
PhotoScan (a poor 3mp), so modded it to bump the final resolution to 12mp
[https://www.xda-developers.com/modded-version-of-googles-
pho...](https://www.xda-developers.com/modded-version-of-googles-photoscan-
increases-resolution-to-12mp/)

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bflesch
Would be great if you can just take a video and it would automatically capture
the keyframes relevant for this type of transformation.

The end game would be that you put your phone in recording and on some stand,
and you just have to slowly turn the pages of your photo album. One can dream.

~~~
ehsankia
That would be extra processing analyzing frames trying to find the right ones.
Again, the biggest problem with this is doing it on the phone at a reasonable
speed.

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sitkack
Interleave a lower resolution higher frame rate video with the maximum frame
rate of the largest size image (5-8 fps). Process the images in the background
when the phone is wall power, and or push to cloud. It would be nice to do an
incremental first pass to see if one has high enough quality source material.

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welder
I tried this but the resulting image either still had glare or was super low-
quality. Too bad, really hoped it would work.

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ehsankia
Have you tried it again recently? The new update allows for higher quality.

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welder
Nope, tried it last 4 months ago.

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radarsat1
Really nice challenge for computer vision: given a video of a camera moving
around above a photo, with a variety of (unknown) distances and angles, for
each frame, find the photo, merge pixels to give super-resolution. Even with
all the advances lately in vision research we are still not there yet.

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smlacy
There was some talk of the maximum resolution being 3MP, but that through some
hackery this could be increased to 12MP.

I didn't see any mention of resolution in the blog post, and many comments
here and elsewhere about low quality.

Is the resolution still capped?

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ehsankia
From the news I heard, this new update they talk about allows for higher
resolution (on faster phones).

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terheyden
I tried this just now - yes, it removes the glare, but the resulting image is
very low-res compared to just using the camera app.

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dbg31415
So I really like it... but...

It makes really blurry photos. Every photo I take looks like someone turned
the pixelate filter on.

Any suggestions... I'm doing this at night with lights on... will try it
tomorrow during the day to see if more light is the answer.

EDIT: The photos I get back aren't only blurry, compared to photos I take with
my phone camera, but they are about 2/3rds the size. iPhone 6S... I'd rather
it take a bit longer on the compile and get me a better quality image.

Example. [http://i.imgur.com/63tgrwK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/63tgrwK.jpg)

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martin-adams
I used PhotoScan in December to digitise a lot of my parents photo albums. I
was really impressed with the ease and results. Right now I would consider
using anything else.

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nbohra
you would consider...or you would _not_ consider using anything else :-)

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martin-adams
Oops, not consider. I keep doing that!

But that said, I've not explored what else is out there.

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sigi45
Had bad results with an avg smartphone camera.

It sucks when science creates something cool but it doesn't work in the real
world.

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m-p-3
There's also this problem
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dbo07/google_phot...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dbo07/google_photoscan_artificially_limits_capture/)

> After testing PhotoScan on a variety of pictures using four different
> phones, I'm sad to report that we're not getting our camera's worth from the
> app. The long dimension of scanned pictures is always scaled (up or down) to
> 2,000 pixels, compared to the 4,000-pixel capture resolution of the 6P (12.3
> MP -> less than 3 MP).

~~~
pasbesoin
I noticed the limited resolution, as well.

If you are looking for real "archival" imaging, this app probably won't
suffice.

On the other hand, it's nice to have on your phone to grab the occasional
image e.g. from a picture on the wall behind glass or something similar. As
another commenter mentions, maybe to grab an old photograph out of an album
and put it on Facebook or the like.

Users should also note, its cropping is not always accurate -- larger
contrasts produce better results. But, after it grabs its initial image, you
can adjust the cropping -- _including outward, to the limit of what was
initially imaged._

P.S. I have a Nexus 5x. I'm guessing the app may work relatively well for me
also because I'm using a phone that the Google developers are particularly
likely to specifically support and have used/tested against.

Since this appears to be a small project -- maybe a 20%-er or the like? -- at
a guess, results may vary significantly depending upon phone and camera
module. At a guess -- I've no idea.

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nodesocket
I used PhotoScan (iOS) to scan about 20 photos, and it worked surprisingly
well. The quality was great, no clipping or unexpected cropping. Really
impressed.

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neuronexmachina
It also worked quite well for me on a Nexus 6P.

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Finnucane
Wouldn't it be easier to arrange your lighting to not reflect back up to the
camera (i.e., like a copystand)?

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Chaebixi
Copystands don't look cheap:

[https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Copystands/ci/711/N/37151...](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Copystands/ci/711/N/3715154809)

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wtallis
Copystands that are large or have integrated lighting are quite expensive. I
use a $45 smaller copy stand with a pair of $7 lights clamped to the shelf
above my desk. If you have a real camera with a tripod mount, it's a very
reasonable solution.

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_jal
My takeaway is that the twitching hip is disturbing.

[https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q5bnNur88ME/WPfbie00jGI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q5bnNur88ME/WPfbie00jGI/AAAAAAAABwU/46YVBXgKuGoW5dtsu2tyFp6Gwt8MS78WQCLcB/s640/image30.gif)

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robbrown451
I get good results just taking pictures of pictures outside in bright
sunlight, as long as the sun isn't directly overhead. They are evenly lit,
plenty of light so not grainy, and no glare.

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anigbrowl
Very interesting. I had similar problems when photographing my paintings, and
while the best photographs are taken with a good DSLR and a polarizer that can
end up becoming a project in itself.

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s_gourichon
Many comments the output pixel count, no one seems to have noticed (1) the
white border (2) ad at bottom (3) JPEG artifacts (block and mosquito noise on
edges, dull and noisy colors, color smear) excessive compression. No wonder:
158kbytes for a 1399x2184 picture is 0.05 byte per pixel which ... may be
enough or not depending on your quality expectations.

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s_gourichon
It might be that photos that are sent to Google get saved with decent
compression (0.5 byte per pixel instead of 0.05) in DCIM/PhotoScan. Yet what
if I want to keep ridiculous old haircuts private? There's no explicit "save
locally" feature. :-/

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foobarbecue
Oh great, a third PhotoScan.
[http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.org/index.php?/topic/3...](http://forums.culturalheritageimaging.org/index.php?/topic/328-photoscan-
vs-photoscan/) (One is an extremely popular SfM package, and the other is an
obscure SfM package.)

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fredley
I would be interested to see a side-by-side of the original photo, and a (high
quality) print out of the photoscan image.

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willis42
The new capture mode with no glare removal has much higher resolution, still
does the cropping and rotation.

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pbw
I tried this and my result was _really_ low resolution _and_ had a giant blob
of glare on it. Had really high hopes from all the technology behind it, but
it didn't work in my case.

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gvurrdon
Same here - both glare and low resolution have been problematic. I see that
someone has tried to deal with the resolution, though:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/65p6n9/google_phot...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/65p6n9/google_photoscan_patch_v2_resolution_increased_to/)

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dingo_bat
Incompatible with S7 edge :(

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mappu
Do you know if you have the Exynos or Snapdragon version? I hypothesize it
depends on the latter's Hexagon DSP.

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dingo_bat
I have Exynos. Feels bad.

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agumonkey
PhotoScan [1] seems quite fancy. I wonder if they have super-resolution and
post stabilization flow de-blurring in the pipeline for "simple" photos.

[1] nice initials btw

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itaysk
it looks like a new thing, but 2 weeks ago I stumbled upon this via a link in
Google Photos app and tried it. Resulting picture did not look better then one
taken without flash in a lighted room using camscan app.

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sprafa
brilliant bricklaying. Is this really the best thing CV researchers should be
doing? There are so many unsolved problems and they're working on removing
glare from old photos?

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koolba
This is neat. I've got a ton of these "pics of pics" of old family members so
this definitely appreciated.

Who's the guy in the sample pic? One of the researchers?

