How to clean up whiteboard photos with apps

I used to use a software called Pixid Whiteboard Photo (for Windows) that could transform a photo of a whiteboard, remove the glare, fix the perspective if the image wasn’t square, all with a few clicks. The resulting enhanced image quality is even suitable for optical character recognition (OCR) software. See this before and after photo:

 

Then Polyvision bought out this software company in 2000, and somewhere along the line, the software is no more and discontinued. This software was called Steelcase / Polyvision Model 636 Whiteboard Photo Image Capturing Software and retailed for $221 but also discontinued. There’s another similar functioning software called ClearBoard for $99.95. And there’s source code for Save My Whiteboard for Mac. Also found ScanScribe (Windows/Mac) from Xerox Parc.

There are 2 web apps that can do this conversion, one via email at snapclean.me and another one at unwhiteboard.com (gone: Ricoh Whiteboard Cleanup).

You’d think there’d be more software readily available for this, but I haven’t found many. There is a workaround for cleaning up whiteboard photos using Gimp or Photoshop.

There are smartphone apps that can do this convert a whiteboard photo into a neatly clean image, like:

• Ricoh Whiteboard Share (iOS) free + Whiteboard Share for Android
• CaptureBoard (iOS) freemium [$0.99 to remove watermark]
• Whiteboard Photo+ (iOS)
• Office Whiteboard (iOS)
• Whiteboard Capture Pro (iOS) $2.99
• CamScanner+ (iOS) $4.99 + CamScanner – Phone PDF Creator for Android (paid version for $4.99)
• JotNot Scanner Pro (iOS) $0.99
• WBConference (Android) free
• Whiteboard Snap (Android) free
• Qipit (iOS) – discontinued
• ScanR – discontinued?

Instructions for how to clean up whiteboard images in Photoshop:

http://www.wikihow.com/Copy-a-Whiteboard-With-Your-Digital-Camera-or-Camera-Phone

http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/11/cleaning_digita.html – Cleaning Digital Photos of Drawings