Fast correction of bleed-through distortion in grayscale documents by a blind source separation technique

Ancient documents are usually degraded by the presence of strong background artifacts. These are often caused by the so-called bleed-through effect, a pattern that interferes with the main text due to seeping of ink from the reverse side. A similar effect, called show-through and due to the nonperfe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal on document analysis and recognition 2007-06, Vol.10 (1), p.17-25
Main Authors: TONAZZINI, Anna, SALERNO, Emanuele, BEDINI, Luigi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Archives & records
Artificial intelligence
Computer science
control theory
systems
Documents
Exact sciences and technology
Gray scale
Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry
Pressure reduction
Separation
Signal processing
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Summary:Ancient documents are usually degraded by the presence of strong background artifacts. These are often caused by the so-called bleed-through effect, a pattern that interferes with the main text due to seeping of ink from the reverse side. A similar effect, called show-through and due to the nonperfect opacity of the paper, may appear in scans of even modern, well-preserved documents. These degradations must be removed to improve human or automatic readability. For this purpose, when a color scan of the document is available, we have shown that a simplified linear pattern overlapping model allows us to use very fast blind source separation techniques. This approach, however, cannot be applied to grayscale scans. This is a serious limitation, since many collections in our libraries and archives are now only available as grayscale scans or microfilms. We propose here a new model for bleed-through in grayscale document images, based on the availability of the recto and verso pages, and show that blind source separation can be successfully applied in this case too. Some experiments with real-ancient documents arepresented and described.
ISSN:1433-2833
1433-2825
DOI:10.1007/s10032-006-0015-z