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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost DIY graphics tab using a webcam, pen, and paper for educators to record lectures, addressing high costs of traditional graphics tablets with a novel image processing pipeline.

Contribution

It presents a cost-effective alternative to graphics tablets by developing a webcam-based system with segmentation and post-processing techniques for lecture recording.

Findings

Effective in capturing handwritten content despite occlusion and lighting issues

User experience evaluations show positive acceptance among teachers

Comparable performance to commercial graphics tablets

Abstract

Recording lectures is a normal task for online educators, and a graphics tablet is a great tool for that. However, it is very expensive for many instructors. In this paper, we propose an alternative called "DIY Graphics Tab" that functions largely in the same way as a graphic tab, but requires only a pen, paper, and laptop's webcam. Our system takes images of writings on a paper with a webcam and outputs the contents. The task is not straightforward since there are obstacles, such as hand occlusion, paper movements, lighting, and perspective distortion due to the viewing angle. A pipeline is used that applies segmentation and post-processing for generating appropriate output from input frames. We also conducted user experience evaluations from the teachers.