Snapfish Lab

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Snapfish Lab
URL http://www.snapfishlab.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Corporate Research Website
Registration Optional
Owner Hewlett-Packard
Created by HP Labs
Launched 2008
Current status Public Beta


Snapfish Lab is a web portal and application framework that HP Labs provides to showcase some of its imaging research and to solicit feedback from users and the imaging research community.

Contents

[edit] Overview

The site contains a series of new experimental imaging tools. A set of sample photographs allow the user to try the tools without registering. If users log on with their Snapfish user credentials they can use the tools on their own photograph collections. A discussion forum allows users to give feedback on their experience.

[edit] Company Structure

Snapfish Lab is a service of HP Labs, the research and advanced development division of Hewlett-Packard.

[edit] Imaging Tools

The experimental imaging tools provided by the site are:

  • Poster Creator allows users to combine multiple photographs into a single large sheet of paper. An automatic algorithm, Block Recursive Image Composition[1], automatically arranges the photographs. The user can choose between alternate automatic layouts and fine-tune the results by swapping photographs or cropping them.
  • Auto Crop uses face detection and a proprietary saliency analysis algorithm to find the most important parts of a photograph. It then uses aesthetic rules to crop the photograph to increase the proportion of the image that is filled with salient content while avoiding violating rules of composition.
  • Note Capture takes a photographs of some text or graphics on a page or a whiteboard and fixes the perspective distortion to produce the original rectangle.
  • Clear Note extends Note Capture by using a watershed image segmentation algorithm to separate out the foreground writing from the background surface. This allows it to convert the background to white, producing an image that is more suitable for printing.[2]
  • Fisheye Visualization presents an interactive view of an album of photographs as an array of images where the sizes and positions are distorted as if a fisheye lens were following the cursor. This gives the user an overview of the entire album as small thumbnails while giving them a movable magnified view of some photographs.
  • Automatic Horizon Alignment analyzes a photograph to look for a near-horizontal line. If it finds one it rotates the photograph slightly to make the line perfectly horizontal. This is intended to straighten snapshots in which the horizon is not level

[edit] See also

Other corporate research websites include:

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Clayton Brian Atkins: Adaptive photo collection page layout. ICIP 2004: 2897-2900
  2. ^ Jian Fan, Xiaofan Lin, Steven J. Simske: A Comprehensive Image Processing Suite for Book Re-mastering. ICDAR 2005: 447-451