Snapter - an easy way to turn your papers digital?
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James over at jkOntheRun highlights a new piece of software that looks ideal for student use (especially those operating paperlessly). Atiz, the company behind the Bookdrive DIY (highlighted by alcuin in our forums a couple of days ago), have released Snapter - an application that allows you to ’scan’ a document into an elecronic format using nothing more than a digital camera.
I know from my point of view, and from others students I’ve spoken to, that getting handouts and articles into a digital format can be a bit of a struggle but it looks like Snapter may offer a good solution. Aziz offer a FREE 14-day fully functioning trial of Snapter but if you’re quick, and have a prizewinning idea of how you would use it, then get yourself over to jkOntheRun and let James know about it. He’s got 4 full licences to give away to the best suggestions.
EDIT: Thanks for all of the comments. Looks like Snapter is building a bit of interest and no wonder, it potentially fixes a major problem. I know Tracy is going to put up some samples from her test of the trial but I’ve also had a a bit of a play and thought I’d post a couple of results for those who may be a bit wary about giving this a try. I took a fairly standard snap of an open book and here’s a screenie of the book in the app window and the results (click to expand any of the pics):
First impressions are good (and this picture was taken in low light). It does however seem quite important to place the book/handout etc. on a good contrasting background i.e. a darker coloured desk but that’s no big deal. I also took a purposely off-angle snap of a handout and that also converted really well indeed.
Other posts that may interest you:
Its much easier to carry a digital camera with you than a scanner. Looks like a good way to capture handouts.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:14 pmWow, if this programs works on books the way it says it does, this would be an amazing program for a student. Digital cameras are a lot easier to get a hold of or borrow from friends/family if you don’t have one. For a while I “scanned” my books by picture but the downfall is it took so long to process after taking the picture.
With a 5 megapixel camera, you can easily get a great picture even with taking a picture of two pages at once. This allows you to “scan” twice as fast. It also means you can scan as fast as you can snap a pic.
Interesting…very interesting.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:36 pmI wish the example images were bigger…hopefully they’re not hiding something…could it be too good to be true?
April 25th, 2007 at 5:48 pmThat could just be because it’s in Beta. I’ll give the demo a try in a sec.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:27 pmHey sounds interesting. Tracy, you posted something back in 2004 under the topic “scanners” regarding using a digicam for digitizing books and one of the websites caught my eye. The before and after pictures are REMARKABLE.(all of them)I was wondering if anyone has had a chance to try the software out? Do you think it’s similar to snapter?
Whiteboard Photo http://www.pixid.com/products/wbp.asp
April 25th, 2007 at 6:37 pmThose before and after pics are pretty amazing on that whiteboard site. We can only hope…
April 25th, 2007 at 11:08 pmOh hey, cool. In small print it says the trial is fully functional after 14 days, it just leave light water marks on the pages. That would still work for student use just fine! Free for casual use!
Trying it now…just installed…
April 25th, 2007 at 11:11 pmA little slow but it works pretty well. I’ll post pictures tomorrow but I need some sleep tonight.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:15 pmConverted page 315 to a high quality PDF. The file size went up from 402KB to 533KB. OCR performed as expected given the low contrast of the image–apprx. 60% accuracy.
I see potential with a super duper fast memory card and a tripod.
April 26th, 2007 at 8:43 amDoes increased contrast improve OCR?
April 26th, 2007 at 9:16 amNice bit of scientific work there Frank. I personally don’t see Snapter as a complete book scanning solution. I think it’s too fiddly for that and, as you’ve suggested, not particularly successful as far as OCRing goes. No I see it more as an ad hoc solution for electronically grabbing lecture handouts and snippets of books in the library instead of having to photocopy them.
Oh how I wish this was available to me in first year. I think it could have saved me two years of grief :o)
April 26th, 2007 at 10:13 amMatt, increased contrast will help with OCR accuracy if it darkens the text and lightens the surrounding background color. Even with black and white images adjusting the contrast gets rid of shadows and brings out the text.
Robert, I thought the OCR success resulting from your image was to be expected. That’s a good thing. It means there is a good chance that a textbook with black lettering and a white background should recognize (what may seem) in a range of 90% or above. It’s never going to be perfect, but enough to highlight in Acrobat seems good to me.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:56 amHugh Sung’s review for sheet music and Snapter: http://hughsung.com/blog/index.php?itemid=747
Shame, as sheet music is still the main thing I’d like to scan.
Do people still like their Optibooks?
April 28th, 2007 at 12:12 pmThanks for the link Chris. Looks like Hugh’s Snapter experience isn’t a good one :o( He’s using a 5.1 megapixel camera like I did for my test ’scans’ so he’s not inferior on resolution. Yet I’m delighted with the results. I did have a bit of ‘wacky border’ recognition but nothing to the same degree as Hugh and I was able to re-adjust the border nodes enough to recitfy mine (as Hugh acknowledges not all the border nodes are selectable. I found this a slight frustration too and the developers REALLY NEED to allow all of the nodes to be repositioned). Ultimately though there’s a world of difference I’d imagine between capturing words and capturing music but I would be interested to see if a much higher MP camera would make a difference to Hugh’s attempts.
Personally I need to spend a lot more time roadtesting Snapter before I can give my absolute final opinion on it. I’ve maybe got a bit overexcited by its promising potential but when I get these couple of busy uni weeks out of the way I’ll settle down and systematically test it. If anyone else performs a full ‘roadtest’ I’d love to hear the results and your opinions (as I’m sure all of the team and a lot of our readers would)
As for my Opticbook Chris it still remains a ‘cornerstone’ in my day-to-day life. As I said in a comment above Snapter would never become a complete book scanning solution for me. If I need to scan from home I would always head for the Opticbook rather than the digi camera. Snapter’s strength, in my opinion, lies in its ‘on the fly’ ability.
April 28th, 2007 at 12:41 pmI’m anxious to give this a try. I have loads of photographed books and journals that might be better OCR candidates if flattened out. (When those interlibrary loan books come at inconvenient times, as they always do, the digital camera is my best friend!)
April 29th, 2007 at 4:28 amAnyone tried this with something as crappy as an old 3.1 MegaPixel?
April 29th, 2007 at 9:14 pmDang-it. I would so give this a try except I lost my camera cable connector thing and I have a Sony so I have to find a memorystick adapter…
April 29th, 2007 at 10:14 pmGreetings from Snapter team. We’ve already fixed the issues that Hugh Sung encountered. The version he reviewed was 1.03.03.
Make sure you download the newest version from our web (1.03.04) at http://www.atiz.com/snapter.html
April 30th, 2007 at 3:57 amContrary to it being the ultimate portable camera scanning solution, it might actually function best in a photoshoot setup as in their examples to get optimal results.
But hopefully this program continues to develop. As digital camera’s improve so will this program.
April 30th, 2007 at 8:42 amSee new processing of Hugh Sung’s music sheets on this page using new version of Snapter (v. 1.03.04) http://www.atiz.com/test001.html
April 30th, 2007 at 9:03 am@Matt - As I’m curious being I attempted using Snapter with an old 2.1 digi cam I had laying around as well. Snapter performed as it should with it. The resultant ’scan’ is usable but only just (I’d post a shot of the image but I’m on campus right now). So it would seem at least a 5 MegaPixel is a must.
April 30th, 2007 at 9:36 amIf Snapter knew more information, would it be able to create more accurate images? Information such as (my main purposes is for books and not really portable scanner) page size, number of pages, book thickness, camera distance from object, etc. Maybe an advanced mode?
April 30th, 2007 at 11:30 amI downloaded 1.03.04 and had exactly the same issues as Hugh Sung. I don’t know what they have improved. I tried some books (2-page spreads) with text only, and almost none of the nodes were movable, thus it wanted to do totally weird things. Also, has anyone figured out how to abandon one image and try another without having to close the program and restart???
May 1st, 2007 at 4:01 amYou can close an image with a right click on the input (or output) image list.
May 1st, 2007 at 10:28 am@Karla - I d/led the new version and personally found it easier to reposition the border nodes. I don’t know what to suggest other than contacting Atiz. I’ve found them to be very responsive in replying and in offering assistance
May 1st, 2007 at 12:00 pmMy pages crop fine, but are then promptly turned the wrong direction and squished. I don’t have too much time right now to trouble shoot, but I’ll give it another go after Friday.
May 1st, 2007 at 4:40 pmI contacted Atiz and Sarasin had me send an example of what I was working with. I sent a photo that Snapter had not done absolutely wacko things to but where it still had some trouble. The book was photographed much like what Robert’s example showed (not much black background, pretty flat but not totally flat). I grant that I had to use two fingers to hold the pages down, but in my test that wasn’t the main problem. However, Sarasin says the fingers throw everything off, the book isn’t centered well enough, the pages are too curled… Well, apart from the fingers it didn’t look that different from Robert’s sample to me. Anyhow, if Snapter can’t do this sort of thing yet, that’s that, but if they expect people to use Snapter to process books as well as totally flat objects, then they have more development to do. I hope they will, because not every book can be opened totally flat and will stay that way without being held down. Many of the books I’ve photographed have much tighter bindings than the one I used for my test. But I’ll look and see if I have anything that didn’t have to be held open/flat.
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:32 am@Karla - sorry Karla i do not understand why you say that the book have to be flat, i did several tests and it works well with very curled pages…did you try the book examples images located in snapterexamples ?
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:13 amWell, I’ve done more tests and sometimes it’s ok and sometimes not. Personally I thought that the whole purpose of the software was to correct curl and similar problems, but Sarasin says of my not-very-curled sample “Snapter isn’t designed to be able to magically transform every imaginable curled picture into flat nice pages.” Sarasin didn’t think the image was centered well enough, which ok it wasn’t perfectly centered but that wasn’t even the problem. I did my tests (will do some more) on photos I had already taken of books, not photos done specially for test purposes. However, I looked for samples that I thought would work well.
May 2nd, 2007 at 3:49 am@Karla - I commend you for spending so much time experimenting with this. I apologise for being so bogged down that I can’t dedicate as much time on this as you have but I intend to when I’me a bit less bogged down from the middle of next week.
I think as you point out this product has to develop a bit more, at least in relation to how it processes books, before it becomes truly usable. Like I’ve said I’ve used Snapter a few times ‘on the go’ now and found it truly invaluable and experienced little problem in using it. Maybe I’ve just been lucky so far. However taking into account how many digi cams there are (and their resolution capabilities), infinte differences in lighting conditions, different book types etc. etc. this must be a difficult app to get working right each and every time because of all the variables. I’m sure they will get it right though.
Oh and Karla, I know you’re an Art Historian so you may be interested in a technique I developed for helping to remember artwork dates. I took a couple of semesters of Art History and really had a problem with remembering dates. It may appear to be a short cut to revision and takes away the correct study of art but quite the reverse happens. As you would know establishing the date is so important for putting art into context etc. and aside from doing that my technique also forces the student to spend a lot more time studying the work in order to implement the ‘date inserting’ technique. What’s more it’s a uber TabletPC friendly technique. I’d love to hear your opinion:
http://www.paperlessundergrad.co.uk/pu/2006/02/puttingadate_.html
*Sorry to go slightly off-topic guys!!
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:22 am3 rules for book scanning with Snapter: 1. snap from the center of the book 2. only one book at a time. 3. don’t put fingers on the upper/lower part of the book.
Karla got problem because her picture didn’t follow rule 1 and 3.
The fingers pushed on the lower part of the page blocked the view of the curve of the page.
We already told on our page that fingers on the side are ok. but fingers on the bottom are not.
http://www.atiz.com/howtouse_snapter.php?page=Additional
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:34 pmRobert, thanks for the link, I’ll be linking to it when I discuss ways for students to study efficiently.
As for Snapter, I’m not interested in a debate over the qualities of my photo or whether I read their recommendations (I did). It’s obvious the software works on photos of books under very specific conditions. I never claimed my photos were ideal. I just wanted to see if Snapter would work on photos I already had, which it mostly does not. Thus, in Snapter’s CURRENT iteration, I should stick with just pulling the existing photos into Acrobat and reading them that way. I know Snapter will improve over time.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:58 ami tried it and it seems to work great for me.
the modes on docs and cards are rather trouble-free and painless.
As for book scanning, i first got problems too, but it made all the difference after i contacted them and then i’d follow those rules.
they got good grade (at least for me) for being very responsive.
May 4th, 2007 at 5:48 amOK, I’ve done more testing using book photos I already had on hand that seemed like good candidates… I wasn’t going to do photos specially for this project since that wouldn’t deal with real-life situations. It wasn’t my intention to subject the software to impossible conditions, but I had trouble finding photos that worked really well. See http://calypsospots.blogspot.com/2007/05/adventures-in-snapter-testing.html
May 11th, 2007 at 4:06 am[...] remember back in April that we introduced you to Snapter, a software based scanning solution that utilises a digital camera as its primary means of input? [...]
July 29th, 2007 at 7:29 amI’ve used version 2.0 of Snapter ice, and just finished processing some 70 pages of a text from a textbook. Border detection was perfect, maybe because I used lack background, and overall quality was surprisingly good. I think this tool will save me hours and hours of time.
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