Shears

Extract pictures from historical book scans.

Installation

pip install shears

Basic Usage

Suppose you want to extract the image content within the following page scan:

Assuming you have saved the page scan to your current working directory, you can extract the image content with the following:

import shears

# extract the image content
result = shears.clip('input.jpg')

# show the extracted image
shears.plot_image(result)

# save the extracted image
shears.save_image(result, 'result.jpg')

This returns and saves the following image:

That's all it takes! The examples below show how to process more complex input images.

Processing Book Scans

Suppose you want to extract the illustration content from the page scan below:

To extract illustrations in pages like this, one can pass filter arguments to shears:

import shears

# use the filter parameters to pull out the illustration on a page
result = shears.clip(i,
                      filter_min_size=900,
                      filter_threshold=0.8,
                      filter_connectivity=1)

# show the extracted illustration
shears.plot_image(result, 'Extracted Image')

This returns the following image:

For additional examples, please see the sample notebooks in this repository.

Testing

To run the test suite, one can run:

pytest