Software for splitting different stamp images

On Nov 27, 2:27*am, "Victor Manta" wrote:
"Pierre COURTIADE" wrote in message
The link that you are asking for is mentioned on my older page:

http://www.artonstamps.org/Magazine/...can-stamps.htm

Unfortunately, it doesn't work anymore. Im my article I share my
experience of cropping and straightening of scanned images by using
Photoshop. Eventually make a search with Google by using -- batch crop
AND
straighten -- or similar keywords.

Thanks Victor : I recall now your article. I have read it again with a
great interest.
As I have Photoshop as well I'll be able to test your advices.

This seemed an interesting problem, so I just spent the last 3.5 hours
writing scripts to do this using only free tools.

My solution is incomplete: It requires one to scan in a non-lossy
(specifically, not JPEG) format; it's dependent on the black being
"pure" in the scan; and it doesn't straighten the images. But hey,
it's a 3.5 hour solution, and one doesn't have to buy Photoshop. :-)

The code as it is written right now takes a scan of stamps (or other
images), cuts it into rows, then finds stamps with horizontal dividing
space between them, crops them, numbers them sequentially, and puts
them all in a directory. As should be clear from this, there needs to
be empty space in a straight line across the *entire* image dividing
rows, or multiple stamps could end up grouped together.

An illustration should help: http://www.mcgees.org/grid-image/

This would be very easy to convert to a web application. One could
upload a file, or give a URL to an image on the web -- and then could
either download a file with all the images in it, or even have them
displayed on a web page. The problem is that it's rather
computationally intensive: a 300x450 pixel PNG took about 20 seconds
to process on a shared server. That's not a big deal on one's home
computer, but it means I cannot afford to host it as a service for
everyone, much as I'd like to. :-)

As for straightening: I am of the firm belief that this should be done
as another step, on demand, because data will be destroyed in the
process.

Thoughts? Feedback?

--
Joshua H. McGee
Los Angeles, California, USA, Earth
http://www.mcgees.org --

On 11/26/2010 7:14 PM, Pierre COURTIADE wrote:
Richard Thouin a écrit :

Bonjour Pierre

You have a long memory. I believe you are refering to the EZStamp
software from Marios Thepdossious which is alluded to in a 2006
discussion.

Marios used to intervene quite often on this newsgroup.

I'm not sure the process is exactly what you are searching for. The
software, for what I understand, will automatically crop and
straighten a number of stamps on a page and then will scan them
individually.

Marios has developped a number of stamp and coin related software one
of which competes with our friend Alain's new effort at automatic
stamp recognition.

Here is the original question from the 2006 thread and Marios'
contribution which was the last of 22 in this thread. Links at the
bottom to Marios' site.

Bonjour Richard,

Very nice to speak to you, now from across the Atlantic after we were
able to meet each other "live" in june in Paris !

Yes I had in mind Mario's software : it was very useful to remind me all
the details and the different links.
I thought there was also a free sofware, but i may be wrong.

I am going to read all that again carefully.

Mon meilleur souvenir !

I'm jumping in late here as I've been away on vacation for ten days.
Adobe's Photoshop Elements, much cheaper than the full Photoshop
program, also includes automatic separation and straightening of stamp
images. My results were disappointing, as the perforations seem to
disappear on the separated images. There is also an add on for Gimp, a
free graphics utility program, that purports to do the same thing. I
could not get that feature to work consistently. Some stamps were
straightened, many were not.
Marios' EZImage Professional program works very well, but it is somewhat
expensive.

Bill

On Nov 27, 4:28*am, Joshua McGee wrote:

My solution is incomplete: *It requires one to scan in a non-lossy
(specifically, not JPEG) format; it's dependent on the black being
"pure" in the scan

A solution to this problem just occurred to me -- that is, to get it
to work with JPEG images (by definition, black regions in JPEG files
are not pure.) But I haven't time to write that today; perhaps
tomorrow.

I see that Bill has mentioned a GIMP plugin that does this, too. If
one gets that to work, it might be superior, unless one specifically
wants to run it as a web application, in which case my solution would
seem better.

The goal at the end of this, of course, would be to give anyone here
who wants it a free copy of the software I'm writing.

I've asked Pierre for a couple scans of the sort he wants to segment.
If anyone else wants to submit sample output from his scanner to make
sure it would work with _his_ scanner hardware and software, please
email samples to me. Please scan with a black background (so that
perforations are not cut off) and, ideally (but not necessarily), scan
twice: once as PNG or GIF, and once as JPEG. My address is "joshua",
then the @ sign, then "mcgees.org" (that's obfuscated to evade spam
harvesters and to get it by the newsreaders that would filter out
email addresses.)

(If anyone missed it: a demo of my solution-so-far can be found at
http://mcgees.org/grid-image/)

I'll keep everyone posted.

Cheers,

--
Joshua H. McGee
Los Angeles, California, USA, Earth
http://www.mcgees.org --

"Billns"
"separation and straightening of stamp images. My results were
disappointing, as the perforations seem to
disappear on the separated images.

Simple solution, download FREE Google "picasa"

freehand straightening/alignment and crop, a beautiful piece of software

On Nov 28, 9:22*am, Sir F. A. Rien wrote:
"rod allan" found these unused words:

"separation and straightening of stamp *images. My results were
disappointing, as the perforations seem to
disappear on the separated images.

Usually a result of not enough contrast to determine the 'edge'
automatically.

Simple solution, download FREE Google "picasa"

Unfortunately if falls into the 'open and resave' JPG problems.

Perhaps it handles TIF, if so scan in TIF , do your thing and then save as
jpg. Far less 'loss'.

This, broadly, is correct. While picasa cannot (to my knowledge) do
so natively, strictly speaking one CAN losslessly crop regions from a
JPEG file, as long as the upper-left corner of a rectangular crop area
is an even multiple of 16 pixels down from the top of the image and 16
pixels right from the left of the image. This places some limits --
for instance, if your stamp image begins at position (24,24) from the
upper left, then you have to choose between (16,16), (16,32), (32,16),
and (32,32) as the locations where you want to begin your crop.

But this might still be desirable if your TIF scans are too large to
handle natively by your software, or if the files cannot be adequately
managed with the processor speed, storage space, and memory size of
your computer. This could easily happen if you are scanning the full
scanner platen rather than a subregion -- which is precisely the
problem we are trying to solve here! :-)

As an aside, if one is dealing with stamps with expensive color
variants, you do not want to use JPEG at all. The standard technique,
because one cannot trust monitors to duplicate colors correctly, is to
scan the stamp and a color reference card in the same pass. But with
JPEG, pixels can (and almost certainly) will differ in color even
within a uniform color card and within the relevant regions of your
stamp, let alone differing when comparing the former to the latter.

This is a result of the techniques used to compress JPEGs in the first
place, under the heading "chroma subsampling", taking advantage of the
fact that the human eye is hugely more sensitive to changes in
brightness than in color. This is great, as far as it goes (such is
wonderfully suited for holiday photos, for instance), but if your
customer will be zooming into your image 16x to look in detail at the
colors in your stamp, he will see inaccurate information.

--
Joshua H. McGee
Los Angeles, California, USA, Earth
http://www.mcgees.org --

On 11/27/2010 2:40 PM, rod allan wrote:
"Billns"
"separation and straightening of stamp images. My results were
disappointing, as the perforations seem to
disappear on the separated images.

Simple solution, download FREE Google "picasa"

freehand straightening/alignment and crop, a beautiful piece of software



Yes, Picassa is a fine program. I use it as my default graphic viewer.

AFAIK, though, it doesn't separate and straignten images automatically.

Bill

"Sir F. A. Rien" wrote in message
...
Billns found these unused words:

On 11/27/2010 2:40 PM, rod allan wrote:
"Billns"
"separation and straightening of stamp images. My results were
disappointing, as the perforations seem to
disappear on the separated images.

Simple solution, download FREE Google "picasa"

freehand straightening/alignment and crop, a beautiful piece of software



Yes, Picassa is a fine program. I use it as my default graphic viewer.

AFAIK, though, it doesn't separate and straignten images automatically.

Bill

... and as with all such, when you open a compressed .jpg, do something
and
re-save - there's a loss of quality.

Save your original scans to a 'lossless format', do the 'stuff' and
finally
save to .jpg for the web. If you have the disc space also save the changes
first in lossless!

If Picassa doesn't separate and straighten images automatically then the
whole .jpg stuff, placed here, doesn't improve something of important. In
other words, if one cannot do what he intended then a loss of quality due
just to some JPEGs manipulations is irrelevant.

Or have I missed something?

--
Victor

On 11/27/2010 1:46 PM, Joshua McGee wrote:
On Nov 27, 4:28 am, Joshua wrote:

My solution is incomplete: It requires one to scan in a non-lossy
(specifically, not JPEG) format; it's dependent on the black being
"pure" in the scan

A solution to this problem just occurred to me -- that is, to get it
to work with JPEG images (by definition, black regions in JPEG files
are not pure.) But I haven't time to write that today; perhaps
tomorrow.

I see that Bill has mentioned a GIMP plugin that does this, too. If
one gets that to work, it might be superior, unless one specifically
wants to run it as a web application, in which case my solution would
seem better.

The goal at the end of this, of course, would be to give anyone here
who wants it a free copy of the software I'm writing.

I've asked Pierre for a couple scans of the sort he wants to segment.
If anyone else wants to submit sample output from his scanner to make
sure it would work with _his_ scanner hardware and software, please
email samples to me. Please scan with a black background (so that
perforations are not cut off) and, ideally (but not necessarily), scan
twice: once as PNG or GIF, and once as JPEG. My address is "joshua",
then the @ sign, then "mcgees.org" (that's obfuscated to evade spam
harvesters and to get it by the newsreaders that would filter out
email addresses.)

(If anyone missed it: a demo of my solution-so-far can be found at
http://mcgees.org/grid-image/)

I'll keep everyone posted.

Cheers,

--
Joshua H. McGee
Los Angeles, California, USA, Earth
http://www.mcgees.org --

Joshua's approach certainly separates images. But does it straighten
them automatically?

Once our Christmas preparations are well in hand, I'll scan some stamps
using TIF instead of JPG to see if that helps. GIMP separates well but
can't seem to straighten the separated stamps consistently.

Bill

Joshua McGee a écrit :
............
I've asked Pierre for a couple scans of the sort he wants to segment.
If anyone else wants to submit sample output from his scanner to make
sure it would work with _his_ scanner hardware and software, please
email samples to me. Please scan with a black background (so that
perforations are not cut off) and, ideally (but not necessarily), scan
twice: once as PNG or GIF, and once as JPEG. My address is "joshua",
then the @ sign, then "mcgees.org" (that's obfuscated to evade spam
harvesters and to get it by the newsreaders that would filter out
email addresses.)

(If anyone missed it: a demo of my solution-so-far can be found at
http://mcgees.org/grid-image/)

I'll keep everyone posted.

Cheers,


Hello Joshua,

Many many thanks for all the time you spent on this interesting subject
!
I am very late doing these scans and sending them to you but I'll do
them ! I duly appreciate your interest in the question I raised.

--
All the best,
Pierre Courtiade

rod allan a écrit :
"Pierre COURTIADE"
I have an old Epson scanner able to scan negative film strips and
positive transparencies (slides ?) which I use quite rarely. It is
not compatible with my new Windows 7 computer,

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...5-225be1a78b52

Many thanks, Rod for this very useful link !
I downloaded these drivers and will see it it works better with them
than with the ones I had.


--
All the best,
Pierre Courtiade