Whiteboarder: A Two Bit Image Processor

Whiteboarder is a two bit image processor, tuned for whiteboard captures. The four most common dry erase marker colors are recognized: black, red, green, and blue. Four colors, ergo two bit color images.

I have long wanted a tool dedicated to cleaning up whiteboard capture images. There are commercial tools but nothing made me happy. Of late I’ve been coding a lot of image processing in a machine learning context. So, Whiteboarder just kinda happened over this last month by hacking on a Jupyter notebook to see what could be cooked up with the tools I was already using for a different purpose.

Note: this is very much not an end-user tool. The tech is simply not mature enough for full auto-pilot. But the results can be impressive with a touch of human intelligence in the mix. So, Whiteboarder is for folks who are comfortable seeing what is going on under the hood. There will be code.

Additionally, the project is an experiment with Jupyter as a development platform. The question is: just how far can a Jupyter notebook’s UI be morphed into an end-user-ish utility tool? The code is available on GitHub.

Whiteboard can read your own images: specify an URL, upload a file, or take a picture in-browser. To take Whiteboarder for a test drive on Colab click below: