Scan a paper document with a webcam and automatically flatten and crop it into a clean digital page.
Blur out sensitive information like ID numbers or account numbers before sharing a scanned document.
Merge, split, or password protect a PDF made from scanned pages.
Search for a specific word across scanned pages using offline text recognition.
| abhishekdhital/hbot | 1ncendium/aibuster | aaronmayeux/ha-hurricane-tracker | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Language | Python | Python | Python |
| Setup difficulty | easy | moderate | easy |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| Audience | general | ops devops | general |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires Python 3.10 or newer on Windows, Tesseract OCR is an optional extra install needed only for the Find in Page search feature.
Hbot is a free, offline desktop app for Windows that turns a webcam or imported images into scanned, cleaned up documents, similar in spirit to phone scanning apps like CamScanner but without sending anything over the internet. It runs entirely on the user's own computer as a Python and PySide6 application. The app can detect the edges of a document held up to a webcam and automatically flatten out the perspective distortion, and it can auto capture a page once it is held steady, then re-arm itself when the page is turned. A book mode splits a two page spread into separate single pages at the center gutter. Once a page is captured, Hbot offers filters such as color correction, shadow removal, black and white, grayscale, and noise reduction, along with manual brightness and contrast controls and rotation. Corners of a detected page can be dragged and adjusted by hand before cropping. Beyond basic scanning, Hbot includes tools for marking up a page: drawing with a pen, marker, or highlighter, blurring out sensitive regions like ID numbers, adding a tiled watermark, and placing a signature either drawn by hand or stamped from a saved image file. It can also search for a word across a page using offline text recognition through Tesseract, with matches highlighted directly on the page. For managing documents, Hbot converts images to PDF and back, converts PDF files to Word documents, and can merge, split, rearrange, or delete pages within a document. It supports AES-256 password protection on PDFs with separate control over print and copy permissions. Setting it up requires Python 3.10 or newer, with Tesseract OCR as an optional extra install for the search feature. The project also includes a one click build script that packages the app into a standalone Windows installer, and it can be built into a ready-made executable through GitHub Actions without needing a Windows machine at all. Hbot is released under the MIT license, and it supports free code signing through the SignPath Foundation's open source program to avoid Windows SmartScreen warnings on first run.
Hbot is a free, offline Windows app that scans documents with a webcam or images, cleans them up with filters and cropping, and manages them as PDFs.
Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, PySide6, Tesseract OCR.
MIT license: use, modify, and distribute freely, including commercially, as long as you keep the copyright notice.
Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.