Making your own document scanner in 40 lines of code

One of the benefits of being proficient with Machine Learning is having a good understanding of the algorithms that run some of the wonderful features we see on our devices. When Apple, the computer device manufacturing company, released the iOS16 version, one of the new functionalities was the ability to use the default Notes app as a digital scanner, think of it as a "scanner in your palm", borrowing a similar phrase from the legendary Steve Jobs. Prior to when it was introduced, I had to use other services usually apps downloaded from the App Store for the purpose of scanning documents with my phones, some paid some free and some of the free apps come with the disadvantage of a watermark which somewhat defeats the purpose unless you subscribe to a paid version. Having worked on a number of computer vision projects, I thought, would it be possible there is some computer vision library or ML algorithm one can use to replicate what's been done in my phone? In this article, we will be using a very popular library familiar to most MLEs familiar with deep learning particular computer vision: OpenCV.