Snapfish Lab

<h2 id="overview">Overview</h2>
<p>The site contained a series of new experimental imaging tools.  A set of sample photographs allowed the user to try the tools without registering. If users logged on with their <a href="/facts/Snapfish/PlSCozrU">Snapfish</a> user credentials they could use the tools on their own photograph collections. A discussion forum allowed users to give feedback on their experience.
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<h2 id="company-structure">Company Structure</h2>
<p>Snapfish Lab was a service of <a href="/facts/HP_Labs/Pq3NGJh4">HP Labs</a>, the research and advanced development division of <a href="/facts/Hewlett-Packard/abuNSYNu">Hewlett-Packard</a>.
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<h2 id="imaging-tools">Imaging Tools</h2>
<p>The experimental imaging tools provided by the site were:
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<ul><li><i>Poster Creator</i> allowed users to combine multiple photographs into a single large sheet of paper. An automatic algorithm, Blocked Recursive Image Composition,<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:1" href="#fn:1"><sup>1</sup></a> automatically arranged the photographs. The user could choose between alternate automatic layouts and fine-tune the results by swapping photographs or cropping them.</li>
<li><i>Auto Crop</i> used face detection and a proprietary saliency analysis algorithm to find the most important parts of a photograph. It then used aesthetic rules to crop the photograph to increase the proportion of the image that was filled with salient content while avoiding violating rules of composition.</li>
<li><i>Note Capture</i> took photographs of some text or graphics on a page or a whiteboard and fixed the perspective distortion to produce the original rectangle.</li>
<li><i>Clear Note</i> extended Note Capture by using a <a href="/facts/Watershed_(algorithm)/BaTCIB7b">watershed image segmentation algorithm</a> to separate out the foreground writing from the background surface. This allowed it to convert the background to white, producing an image that was more suitable for printing.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2" href="#fn:2"><sup>2</sup></a></li>
<li><i>Fisheye Visualization</i> presented an interactive view of an album of photographs as an array of images where the sizes and positions were distorted as if a fisheye lens were following the cursor. This gave the user an overview of the entire album as small thumbnails while giving them a movable magnified view of some photographs.</li>
<li><i>Automatic Horizon Alignment</i> analyzed a photograph to look for a near-horizontal line. If it found one it rotated the photograph slightly to make the line perfectly horizontal.  This was intended to straighten snapshots in which the horizon is not level</li></ul>
<h2 id="see-also">See also</h2>
<p>Other corporate research websites include:
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<ul><li><a href="/facts/Google_Labs/c484S2A6">Google Labs</a></li>
<li><a href="/facts/Yahoo!_Next/3t6ug44G">Yahoo! Next</a></li></ul>

<h2 id="external-links">External links</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.snapfishlab.com/">Official website</a></li></ul>

<h2 id="references">References</h2>

<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><p>C. Brian Atkins: Blocked Recursive Image Composition. ACM Multimedia 2008 <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:2"><p>Jian Fan: Enhancement of Camera-captured Document Images with Watershed Segmentation. CBDAR 2007: 87-93 <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>

Snapfish Lab open-in-new

Snapfish Lab