FairScan: a simple and respectful document scanner for Android

General Project Showcase
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I meant it’s nice with an encrypted database that can be backed up to a network drive, so even if it’s on a insecure drive like google, your scans are still private, and secure.

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hey @Pierre , do you plan on making a blog and share it here about ways to contribute to the dataset so all FOSS scanners can benefit like FUTO did with swipe typing for keyboard?

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Thanks @jerm! I didn’t know about FUTO and swipe typing for keyboards, that’s quite interesting.

I think there are some important differences with what I’m working on.

  • FUTO’s approach seems to rely on collecting a large amount of user-generated data to capture variability between users. For FairScan, what matters most is the diversity of documents and capture situations. That doesn’t necessarily require contributions from many different people, but it does require careful control over what goes into the dataset.

  • For FairScan, I deliberately built the dataset myself to avoid copyright issues (see Building a public dataset for FairScan). Opening it to external contributions would raise difficult questions, not only about image ownership, but also about the rights associated with the documents visible in those images.

I did write a blog post (Learning from failed scans) about how users can share images of scans that didn’t work as expected. I don’t include those images directly in the dataset (mainly for copyright reasons), but they are very helpful to identify failure cases. I can then recreate similar situations for the dataset. Also, while the dataset is mainly used to train the segmentation model, user feedback may highlight issues in other parts of FairScan’s automatic processing (for example brightness or contrast correction), which is equally valuable.

3 Likes
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Hey @Pierre really love your project, it has helped me so much! Will there be a way to support you with donations anytime soon, I really wanna support your work!

1 Like
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Thanks a lot @Roast! I really appreciate the kind words and I’m glad FairScan has been useful to you!

I’m not comfortable accepting donations at the moment. That may change in the future, but for now the best way to support the project is simply to talk about it around you. That already helps a lot.

Thank you again for the support!