Convert color photos of documents to good black-and-white (bitonal) images?

Question

Since I don't have a copier or scanner, I'm using an 8 megapixel camera to copy documents. This works pretty well except they need a lot of processing afterward. I'd like to get from a photo to a bitmap, but using

djpeg -grayscale -pnm photo.jpg |
pgmtopbm -threshold -value XXX

does not work so well, for two reasons:

1. It's hard to guess what XXX should be, and XXX is different for different photos.

2. Illumination varies, and sometimes a single threshold isn't what's right for the image.

How can I do better? The ideal solution will be fully automatic command-line program that I can run on Linux. (I have already written a program to remove dark pixels from the edges of images.)

NOTE: I really want a bitmap, that's just black and white pixels. No grayscale, no dithering.

Answer 1

The best thing I've found in three years is the mkbitmap program that ships with potrace.

Answer 2

-monochrome

This option uses some smart dithering and generates very visible output:

convert -monochrome in.png out.png

Documentation: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/#monochrome

Compare that to a simpler -threshold 50 transform:

convert -threshold 50 in.png out.png

which loses most of the image.

Concrete example from: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/pia15416.html

wget -O orig.jpg http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/650137main_pia15416b-43_full.jpg
# Downsize to 400 height to have a reasonable file size for upload here.
convert orig.jpg -resize x400 in.jpg
convert -monochrome in.jpg out.jpg
convert -threshold 50 in.jpg threshold-50.jpg

in.jpg

out.jpg

threshold-50.jpg

Related questions:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15861025/how-to-convert-an-image-to-1bit-px-binary-bitmap-with-imagemagick-or-rmagick
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/9868/convert-an-image-from-grayscale-to-binary
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/108613/how-do-you-binarize-a-colored-image

Tested in Ubuntu 19.10, ImageMagick 6.9.10.

Answer 3

Apparently, Gimp supports some command-line batch processing. You might be able to give that a shot, since desaturating will probably behave like you'd expect with varying brightness in your images.

Answer 4

Check out your camera. Many modern digital cameras have the ability to take B&W photos directly.

Answer 5

Converting to grayscale / desaturating will preserve most of the noise too. The GIMP has a Threshold filter (under the Color menu) that eliminates the noise, and works very well for line-art and plain black scanned text.

I'm not too clued up on the batch scripting myself, but it sounds like a good idea to use the Threshold with it.

Edit: Since you have Linux as a tag, have a look at Phatch, batch photo manipulations. It has filters to adjust the contrast and brightness too. It's in the Ubuntu repos (if you use that distro)