The 
Paper Tablet project
What if anyone could transform a simple sheet of paper into a real-time scanner? Well, that is exactly what this pipeline does.
Consider a setup where a person is writing on a A4 page and a camera is capturing the scene. The Paper Tablet module will automatically detect, correct and crop the page, requiring no additional steps from the user other than pointing a camera to where the page is. And note that any camera can be used, whether it is a professional DSLR or a smartphone camera, it doesn’t matter.
Just check the video to see how it works!
So, if you haven’t already thought of a few possibilities, let us give you some ideas: if only a photo is provided then it can be used as a regular scanner to digitize documents. If a video is provided then it can output, in real-time, a video of the corrected page. This second application has a lot of potential, especially in the educational environment. Teachers and students could easily share their notebooks with each other in remote classes as they do in school. This would be a great step towards improving online teaching, where there is a pressing need for easy-to-use and affordable solutions that help students learn as well at home as they do in their schools.
The technology: Main modules
This application is built using the “pipeline orchestrator” and has three modules :
- The client, that reads the images/video and sends one frame at a time to the Paper Tablet module.
- The Paper Tablet module, that receives an image as input, detects and crops the sheet of paper, and returns another image where there is only the cropped and aligned sheet.
- The visualizer which receives the output of the Paper Table module and displays it in a web page.
Developer
The Paper Tablet project is currently being developed by André Santos, a MSc student in Electric and Computer Engineering at IST and a consequence of PIV – the Image Processing and Computer Vision class