My Text in Your Handwriting: Utilities
In my continuing quest to upload all of my handwriting project code I have now got the utility tools up, including the required support modules:
hg: My homography module - pretty simple, though it did grow a bit beyond its original purpose. Includes the obvious code for constructing them and applying them (2D case only). Also includes some basic image querying stuff, as they also need access to the b-spline code. Plus an nD Gaussian blur, for no good reason.
ply2: I usually stick to json and hdf5 files, but hit a problem with the handwriting project, as neither was a good fit. json does not really do large amounts of data, whilst hdf5 is not human readable and has poor text support. Instead of creating an entirely new file format I decided to extend the ply format, as it could almost do what was required. I called it ply2, but have done so without the permission of the original developers. My apologies to them if they don't like this! Main changes are an additional type line in the header, to support its new role of containing stuff that isn't a mesh, plus support for typed meta lines in the header, as the comment system is crap. More importantly, I added support for elements/arrays with an arbitrary number of dimensions, string support (utf8), and cleaned it up. The module includes a specification that details this all properly.
handwriting/corpus: Builds a corpus from a load of books downloaded from Project Gutenberg, for the purpose of generating a text sample an author writes out, so the system can learn their handwriting. To use it you will need to download the documents, corpus_data.zip.
handwriting/calibrate_printer: Does a closed loop colour calibration of a scanner-printer pair (I am taking closed loop here to mean the calibration is relative to the devices, not a specified standard). You print out a calibration target then scan it in. A GUI then allows you to learn a colour transform that, if applied to an image in the colour space of the scanner, will adjust it to be as close as possible when printed with the printer. This works only if you use the same scanner to obtain your handwriting samples as to scan in the calibration target. Uses thin plate splines internally.
hg: My homography module - pretty simple, though it did grow a bit beyond its original purpose. Includes the obvious code for constructing them and applying them (2D case only). Also includes some basic image querying stuff, as they also need access to the b-spline code. Plus an nD Gaussian blur, for no good reason.
ply2: I usually stick to json and hdf5 files, but hit a problem with the handwriting project, as neither was a good fit. json does not really do large amounts of data, whilst hdf5 is not human readable and has poor text support. Instead of creating an entirely new file format I decided to extend the ply format, as it could almost do what was required. I called it ply2, but have done so without the permission of the original developers. My apologies to them if they don't like this! Main changes are an additional type line in the header, to support its new role of containing stuff that isn't a mesh, plus support for typed meta lines in the header, as the comment system is crap. More importantly, I added support for elements/arrays with an arbitrary number of dimensions, string support (utf8), and cleaned it up. The module includes a specification that details this all properly.
handwriting/corpus: Builds a corpus from a load of books downloaded from Project Gutenberg, for the purpose of generating a text sample an author writes out, so the system can learn their handwriting. To use it you will need to download the documents, corpus_data.zip.
handwriting/calibrate_printer: Does a closed loop colour calibration of a scanner-printer pair (I am taking closed loop here to mean the calibration is relative to the devices, not a specified standard). You print out a calibration target then scan it in. A GUI then allows you to learn a colour transform that, if applied to an image in the colour space of the scanner, will adjust it to be as close as possible when printed with the printer. This works only if you use the same scanner to obtain your handwriting samples as to scan in the calibration target. Uses thin plate splines internally.