Activity 2: Digital Scanning

In life, it is good to notice that contrary to the belief of second chances, there are just things that you have to let go and just focus on fully moving on. Well, that was my belief before, and I somehow realized through the years that, 

"one should not settle for less as long as you know that you haven't yet done your best."

I realized that there is a certain joy in trying to know the currently unknowable and there is a great satisfaction in adhering to the truth.  One of my mentors once said that you should not feel sad in the process of failing, because once you prove something or a method to be false, you can conclude that truly, it is false. But if you observe something to be true, you should also test its integrity in various systems, instances, limitations, and etc. In addition to what I learned from my mentor, I believe that though the outcome of a certain method or process is essential, what matters more for me is the journey. 

Here, in this activity, we try to recreate something that was made from the past. I observed that even with all the modern knowledge and sophisticated equipment, we can never fully recreate an image that was hand-made before. The variations and differences may decrease, but you can never fully recreate the unique material. Does this mean that we're a failure in doing so? The answer is NO! The journey, together with the fact that you reached a certain similarity and precision is already a form of both internal and external intellectual glory.

THE ACTIVITY

Our Applied Physics 186 class was tasked to recreate a hand-written plot from the old College of Science Archives through basic image processing softwares like Paint, GIMP, Photoshop, or ImageJ. Personally, I used the most basic of them all -- the old-time favorite: Paint. My obtained figure is shown below.

Figure 1. The initial hand-written plot scanned from the College of Science Journal Archives

The initial image scanned was not that aligned well so I had to align it using Windows Photoviewer. It was observed that it had a skewed angle of about 1 degree counterclockwise. After aligning the image, it was then cropped to the axes for ease of access (haha) and conversion as shown in Fig. 2 below.

Figure 2.  The cropped and aligned image for processing and digital scanning

 After the alignment and cropping, the figure is now ready for digital scanning! Through the use of the basic Paint software, the axis was scanned to relate the pixel values with the physical values presented in the plot. The scanning was done through approximations in pixel points of the plot as shown in Fig. 3 below. These pixel points were then analyzed through Kingsoft Spreadsheets (Figure 4a.) and corresponding physical values were then obtained to be approximately 0.048 and 0.0024 for y and x axes, respectively, seen in Figure 4b.

Figure 3. Digital scanning through the use of Paint. The red brush button was used to check the corresponding pixel locations of the tick marks of both X and Y axes.

 

Figure 4. The tabulation of pixel point locations in obtaining the conversion of each axis physical value. It was observed that 1 pixel is equivalent to about 0.048 moisture content percentage (y-axis) and 0.0024 relative humidity (x-axis). The true values of the x and y axes were also found out to have offset values of 1 and -679, respectively.

 After obtaining the conversion values, the data points were then scanned, converted and plotted. The initial plot, as seen in Fig. 5a was observed to be highly similar to the original plot. It is good to note that I also considered the skewness of the original plot from the depth variation in scanning the image. The photocopied plot was a little bit severed due to the rain and it was not perfectly flat upon scanning. Because of this limitation, higher xy values had greater offset than lower xy values. Noticing this limitation allowed me to recreate a much more precise plot. Fig. 5b shows the original plot overlayed in the background through the background edit option of the Spreadsheet. Fig. 5c and 5d just adds colors, axis labels and legends for better comparison. Lastly, Fig. 5f shows the recreated plot (colored) with the original image overlayed in the  background. I included polynomial fitting for better observation of plot trends. It can be observed that the original image quite aligns well with the recreated plot showing high precision and accuracy of pixel to point conversion.

Figure 5. The recreated plots showing the sequence of progresses and additions. The sequence starts (a) with a recreated grayscale plot of the original plot using Spreadsheets. (b) The original image was then overlayed in the background. (c) Plot colors, (d) axis labels, and a legend was then added for better comparison with the original image. Lastly, (d) polynomial fitting and final aesthetic edits of the recreated plot was then added for better trend observation and comparison.

I had fun and was quite entertained on how a very simple tool like Paint can be used as a good image processing software for basic digital scanning.  Because of that, I did not only did and understood the parts of the activity, but also tried to transcend what's needed by introducing an overlayed background image of the original plot, adding more colors for comparison, and polynomial fitting for better trend observation. Therefore, I rate myself a 12/10 for this activity. Enjoy and hope to see you soon!