DIY Graphics Tab: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Graphics Tablet for Educators

TL;DR

This paper introduces DIY Graphics Tab, a low-cost computer vision system that enables educators to record and display handwritten content using a webcam, offering an affordable alternative to expensive graphics tablets for online teaching.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, cost-effective system that uses computer vision to replicate graphics tablet functionality with just paper, a pen, and a webcam, addressing accessibility issues.

Findings

Effective in capturing handwritten content despite occlusion and perspective issues

High user satisfaction among teachers and students

Comparable performance to commercial graphics tablets

Abstract

Everyday, more and more people are turning to online learning, which has altered our traditional classroom method. Recording lectures has always been a normal task for online educators, and it has lately become even more important during the epidemic because actual lessons are still being postponed in several countries. When recording lectures, a graphics tablet is a great substitute for a whiteboard because of its portability and ability to interface with computers. This graphic tablet, however, is too expensive for the majority of instructors. In this paper, we propose a computer vision-based alternative to the graphics tablet for instructors and educators, which functions largely in the same way as a graphic tablet but just requires a pen, paper, and a laptop's webcam. We call it "Do-It-Yourself Graphics Tab" or "DIY Graphics Tab". Our system receives a sequence of images of a person's writing on paper acquired by a camera as input and outputs the screen containing the contents of the writing from the paper. The task is not straightforward since there are many obstacles such as occlusion due to the person's hand, random movement of the paper, poor lighting condition, perspective distortion due to the angle of view, etc. A pipeline is used to route the input recording through our system, which conducts instance segmentation and preprocessing before generating the appropriate output. We also conducted user experience evaluations from the teachers and students, and their responses are examined in this paper.