

New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email - codeslinger
http://snapclean.me/

======
alabut
I really like this trend of Posterous-inspired web apps that don't require
setting up an account, just emailing into a public email address. It's what
changed my mind from "eh, looks nice, might try it later when it's more
robust" to "oh why not, let me email something in and see what happens".

And now the demo of your web app generates a mailing list of potential future
customers along the way. Smart.

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Groxx
(in the FAQ)

    
    
      [Q:] It does funny stuff to my other pictures (not drawings).
      [A:] Yes, yes it does. :)
    

This could open the door to _worlds_ of fun with people who try to push the
boundaries... like... I dunno, send back a picture of a garden gnome in a
bikini if there's no solid background.

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Goosey
Really great idea, but most advanced whiteboard cleanup software includes
perspective correction and things like that.. As far as I can tell this just
is a color-scale modifier and sharpener.

However the idea behind the service, whiteboard cleanup via email, is pretty
sound. I would love to have this with features that allow me to send the pic
along with list of 'end product' recipients.

Need some https secured site as well for sensitive whiteboard snaps.

~~~
kyleburton
Thanks, and yes, the mvp was basic pic cleanup via email. Things like user
accounts and on-line storage are on the plan.

As far as forwarding, how would you like that to work? Configure on the site?
Put them in the Subject line? To keep down on spam I'd have to require an
account for that kind of feature.

Thanks for trying it out.

Kyle

~~~
bradleyland
Both :) I'd love the option to pass configuration through the subject or
message body, but configuring defaults in an account would save typing them in
every time. Options like automatic crop, deskew, and perspective correction
would be essential.

I'm not sure what libs you're using for image processing, but OpenCV has a lot
of this type of functionality.

<http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/>

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Gormo
This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good.

The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original
showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights.

Here is my before and after for comparison:

Before: <http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg> After: <http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg>

~~~
chollida1
The links you posted don't work for me. I get a 404.

~~~
Gormo
Changed to imgur links; try now.

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seancron
It worked pretty well, although it did produce some noise with my image.
However that's probably to be expected with a service like this. Nevertheless,
it made the picture much more readable.

Here are the before and after photos:
[http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz](http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz)

I agree with some of the comments. The noise around the edge of the whiteboard
can be distracting. OCR would be a nice touch if you can get it to work as
well.

Another thing that could be useful is automatic cropping so that the picture
contains more content and less empty space. Maybe have an option to divide the
picture into individual photos if there's enough whitespace? That way you
could have separate photos for separate diagrams.

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mattmillr
Just tried it on an image where the whiteboard was poorly cropped -- lots of
junk around the edges of the pic. The drawing itself was cleaned pretty well,
but the extra stuff was distractingly multi-colored.

It would be nice if it could detect the edges of the whiteboard and crop. As
Goosey mentioned, perspective correction would be nice as well.

Love the idea as an email service, and look forward to seeing what comes next.

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habitue
Since it's targeted specifically to blackboard drawings/diagrams, maybe it
would be possible to vectorize the output

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kyleburton
My apologies to someone, a pic didn't make it back: mattp@a-bb.net had a
permanent delivery failure. No idea how to contact them...hope they were here
and see this.

~~~
unshift
that's me! forwarded an old whiteboard pic just to try it out, and didn't
notice the reply-to was an old work address that apparently no longer exists.
thanks for the heads up!

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kyleburton
A friendly request: if anyone is willing to share their before / after I'd
love to see them (including any suggestions / requests you have for tweaking),
and I'd like to put them up as a gallery, with your permission of course.

Thanks for all of this great feedback!

------
ydant
It fails miserably on my chalkboard photo test (it doesn't claim to support
chalkboard, but it seems like it should - it probably doesn't take much to
determine the background is all dark and run the appropriate scripts)

Your 4 step instructions have doodle@, but the actual mailto: is for wb@. It's
a minor thing, but you should be consistent.

Cool idea. I think you could run pretty far with a posterous style lazy signup
and more options (like the dropbox idea, some storage, etc.) Maybe support
group emails, so dev@ when sent from my email address returns a response to a
certain 5 people.

~~~
kyleburton
Yeah, right now the algorithm subtracts out smooth areas, leaving sharply
defined areas mostly alone. I could look into handling blackboard drawings if
there is enough interest. Good point about the consistency with the email,
I'll have to make them the same. Thanks for the feedback and the ideas,
thanks!

~~~
ydant
My source (chalkboard) image wasn't great (dark, low contrast), but I got
better results from the service by doing an "invert" before sending it on.

~~~
kyleburton
Awesome! Would you be willing to share a chalkboard pic? I don't have access
to one...thanks for the invert tip!

~~~
ydant
You know this already, but I sent them to your email as in your HN profile.

I have no idea how important blackboard is - probably less so for the business
world, but plenty of students use/encounter them.

If it's easy to work out a algorithm that cleans up the blackboard but harder
to work out detecting the blackboard, your idea of two email addresses
(doodle/wb@, and blackboard/bb@) would probably be a good solution.

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jsb
It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or
alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious
example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a
lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier
it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version
back. Boom, done.

Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your
current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be
applied to!

~~~
kyleburton
Thanks for the suggestions. I had thought of a couple of things: simple 90/-90
rotations, removing red eye was one of them - I have to figure out an
automated way of doing that. Thanks for checking it out!

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csarva
Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still
came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice.
Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times.

Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the
display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered
some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved
somewhere to make searching my email easier.

~~~
kyleburton
Glad to know it worked on glass whiteboards - would you be willing to share a
pic? I like the idea of preserving the subject line - make it easier to
organize the photos when they come back (my camera doesn't let me give them
meaningful names). Great idea! Thanks for trying it out.

~~~
csarva
<http://www.pixelcop.org/~chetan/pics/snapclean/wb1.jpg> (resized orig)

<http://www.pixelcop.org/~chetan/pics/snapclean/wb2.jpg> (snapclean)

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lecha
Nice and simple. Good job.

You probably know this, there's <http://www.scanr.com/> that tackles a similar
problem.

~~~
kyleburton
I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the link! Looks like it's more advanced
than what I'm doing at the moment...

Thanks,

Kyle

~~~
jamesjyu
Yes, scanR may be more sophisticated in their image processing technology, but
their system is just not as easy to use (the last time I checked it out).

My suggestion to you is to keep running with your idea of making your service
dead simple to use. I love the idea of just sending it to an email address --
reminds me of posterous, but for image processing.

~~~
ydant
Yes, like Posterous has shown, simple can win you converts even if it's
lacking functionality.

------
acid_bath
I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the
returned image was.

My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea
"send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to
a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find
out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the
average customer though.

~~~
GFischer
Ahh... that's the nice thing.

Customers don't need to know how easy (or hard) something is... some
classmates of mine are now enjoying a trip to South Africa (to see the World
Cup alongside head coach Óscar Tabárez) thanks to some clever marketing...
they made a video indexing software (the indexing is totally manual) and
marketed it as a solution for soccer trainers.

The actual code was much easier than our own project, but it was visually nice
and it was brilliantly marketed. I'm probably going to blog about this if some
of you are interested :)

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ars
Why does it resale the image?

I sent a 640x411 image and got back a 800x514

Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried
was <http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg> \- and yes I know it's not a
whiteboard, but it looks like one.)

~~~
kyleburton
Sorry, I'm rescaling the image right now to roughly 800x600 to keep down on
the memory usage of the process. Based on what I'm seeing today I think I can
raise the maximum picture size and not rescale if it's within that size.
Thanks for giving it a try.

~~~
MartinCron
The last time I did something like this, I made a point to never scale
_upwards_ to the target size.

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electrum
It would be nice to treat the response as a reply (preserve subject, etc.) so
that Gmail can do threading properly.

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albemuth
Here's a before and after test, looks like it needs some tuning for images
that are not as low contrast

<http://sprng.me/154k6>

p.s. that's a springpad link, awesome to just share those stuff from your
phone

~~~
kyleburton
Thank you for the example. Looks like something could be tweaked to do better
on that kind of picture. Would you be willing to let me use that as an example
for trying to improve the algorithm? Thanks again for trying the service.

~~~
albemuth
by all means, use it

~~~
kyleburton
Thanks, and I hate to be a bother, but would you mind sending me an email as
such? kyle@snapclean.com Thanks!

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pook
This is a great idea!

It would be interesting to see this combined with a project management system.
I imagine being able to snap your whiteboard, have the image cleaned, and
placed right onto a project wiki, in one move (similar to Posterous, perhaps).

~~~
kyleburton
Thanks! That's an interesting idea - I know some wikis (like Confluence) can
receive emails...I'll put that onto the list.

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maushu
The email feature is great though a file uploader on the main page wouldn't be
missed. ;)

~~~
kyleburton
Thanks for the suggestion. That is definitely doable, and added to the
backlog. Thanks for checking it out!

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JeffJenkins
Need more description on the first page. Maybe the 4 easy steps from the other
page?

~~~
kyleburton
I had it like that at one point and thought it required too much scrolling to
see the flow...it was also suggested that I make the '4 simple instructions'
into a pretty big button saying 'Get Started Now'.

Thanks for the feedback.

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madmaze
this is awesome! i was brainstorming about how to do something like this a few
weeks ago when one of my fellow students brogth his digital slr in instead of
taking notes..

we started as a group of about 20 or so comp sci students, taking joint notes
in google wave for 2 semesters now.. it works great except if there are alot
of diagrams.. and ascii diagrams just take too long and dont do the original
justice. so we started adding pictures..

i am excited to have a tool to clean them up now =)

ps anyone else doing this joint notes thing? if not you should try it.. it
works wonders for studying for tests

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fourneau
Without complicating the service at all, I would love to see Dropbox
integration. We use Dropbox for all of our shared files and being able to go
from: Whiteboard->Email to Service->Dropbox immediately would be amazing.

~~~
kyleburton
Thank you for the idea, I know dropbox has an api. Added to the list, thanks!

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pgbovine
potentially off-topic, but i'm SO glad that the title of this post wasn't
"Check out our new start-up: cleaning up whiteboard pics via email!!!" the
pitch is honest and straight-forward, and not overselling. excellent work

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dinedal
I can't use this without knowing how long you'll store whatever I send you.

~~~
kyleburton
I'll have to add that to the terms and the faq - I'm using google apps to
handle the email. The app issues a delete immediately after processing. Right
now I'm clearing out the trash folder (edit: sorry the sent folder) in the
google account about every day or so.

What kind of assurances would you like? If I implement accounts, would you be
comfortable with storage? Would you want to be able to choose on a per-picture
basis?

Thanks for taking a look.

Kyle

~~~
dinedal
Personally, I'd prefer an option to have it delete immediately after it's been
processed, even if that's not the default.

Lots of idea's get thrown up on whiteboards where I work, but the boss man is
a little paranoid. In order to become a regular user I would need to know that
nothing I email over is being kept.

I understand the insecurities of email in general, but there's a difference
between available for the duration of the email transmission and available for
days after the email has been sent.

Thanks for being responsive.

~~~
tjr
I once worked in the information security group at a large insurance company,
and they prohibited their employees from using, e.g., AltaVista Babelfish,
lest they mistakenly release confidential information via the translation
tool. Instead, they wanted employees to use a local desktop-based translation
tool.

For all of the security measures that can be taken with sending data to web
applications, "never sending it at all" is very secure indeed, and in some
arenas, the inconvenience may be worth it.

~~~
kyleburton
Just curious - do you know if they'd buy a desktop version of something like
this? If they did previously? Thanks for sharing about these kinds of users.

~~~
tjr
I no longer work with them, so I can only surmise. I never saw anyone using a
tool like this, but it's a big company with many offices, and individual
groups may well have bought their own local tools that weren't provided at the
enterprise level. Would they buy a desktop version? If employees found it
useful, I don't see why not.

They almost certainly would not use the web version, unless they could run it
100% internally on their intranet.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
In my experience, most companies that have rigid security/compliance policies
against using simple web services like babelfish, google translate, etc. also
have rigid purchasing departments that make it almost impossible to sell them
a simple, inexpensive desktop app. They only buy "enterprise solutions" from
"approved vendors". Now admittedly there can be a lot of money selling those
"enterprise soutions", but it's hardly a low barrier to entry game. IMHO
unless the OP wants to get into the business of selling labyrinthian
"enterprise" software, he should probably just ignore companies who have
compliance policies that would prevent them using simple online services.

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theBobMcCormick
Do you have any thoughts on a future revenue model? Maybe build out some kind
of add-on "pro" features?

~~~
ax0n
Aside from selling corporate whiteboard-secrets? (I kid, I kid...)

~~~
kyleburton
Will definitely _not_ be doing that, but I should add reassurance to the
faq/terms/privacy so people know what's what.

~~~
vineetk
Yes. Your current simple privacy policy ("We will not share your email address
with anyone.") is nice, but it doesn't address the privacy of users' content
(i.e. the images they send you).

I don't doubt that you intend to do the right thing, but still, I was honestly
a bit wigged out to not see any mention of the privacy of my data in the
privacy policy.

~~~
kyleburton
Policy updated (ianal though), does it work for you?

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kadavy
I'm surprised Evernote doesn't handle this - or does it? Maybe they'd like to
buy the technology.

~~~
dinedal
Evernote does parse the text out of photos of my home whiteboard.

~~~
kadavy
but does it "enhance" the photo?

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francesco
Are you planning on making a simple API or is email to be considered as the
API?

~~~
kyleburton
I hadn't considered an API - what do you have in mind? An HTTP post &
response? What would you use it for? I just hadn't thought of this since the
graphics libraries and routines are readily available. An API seems to cut out
any possible ad opportunities - is an api something you'd be willing to pay to
use? Thanks for the idea.

~~~
francesco
An HTTP post & response could be an option. It would just open the possibility
for other services to integrate with yours, there making it more flexible and
open to a larger audience. A freemium approach could then be a possibility
(where one starts paying after a certain amount of daily API usage)

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nickzoic
Is it actually just imagemagick and a procmail script?

PS: If you've got one of those old fashioned iPhings, check out JotNot which
does this sort of thing on the phone.

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prawn
Could it be abused by spammers?

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varjag
Getting any traction yet?

------
torpor
Alternative: Learn to use Inkscape.

