CleanPage: Fast and Clean Document and Whiteboard Capture.

Area of Science:

• Computer Vision
• Digital Imaging
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• The increasing need for remote work and sustainability drives the digitization of physical content.
• Existing smartphone scanning applications often produce unsatisfactory results with visible imperfections.
• There is a need for efficient and high-quality digitization tools for documents and whiteboards.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based system for automated document and whiteboard scanning.
• To evaluate the performance and user experience of CleanPage compared to market-leading scanning applications.
• To propose and validate a new quality measure for scanned images.

Main Methods:

• CleanPage utilizes a one-tap process for image capture, identification, cropping, and cleaning.
• A novel testing methodology using synthesized images was developed for ground-truth comparisons.
• Image quality assessments and user experience evaluations were conducted for CleanPage and two competitor apps.

Main Results:

• CleanPage automatically produces high-contrast, low-noise images with clean backgrounds without user intervention.
• Comparative tests showed CleanPage outperformed market leaders in both real paper scans and ground-truth comparisons.
• User experience evaluations indicated CleanPage is faster and easier to use than existing scanning apps.

Conclusions:

• CleanPage offers a superior, automated solution for high-quality digitization of documents and whiteboards via smartphone.
• The system addresses the limitations of current scanning apps, providing cleaner and more reliable results.
• The developed testing methodology and quality measure contribute to the objective evaluation of scanning technologies.