Correcting show-through effects on scanned color document images by multiscale analysis

This paper describes a new approach to restoring scanned color document images where the backside image shows through the paper sheet. A new framework is presented for correcting show-through components using digital image processing techniques. First, the foreground components on the front side are separated from the background and backside components through locally adaptive binarization for each color component and edge magnitude thresholding. Background colors are estimated locally through color thresholding to generate a restored image, and then corrected adaptively through multi-scale analysis along with comparison of edge distributions between the original and the restored image. The proposed method does not require specific input devices or the backside to be input; it is able to correct unneeded image components through analysis of the front side image alone. Experimental results are given to verify effectiveness of the proposed method.