Degraded character image restoration using active contours: a first approach

In this paper, we describe an example of the use of active contours for the reconstruction of degraded character images. Active contours were introduced fifteen years ago by Kass and al. [8], and have been widely used since then for segmentation purpose or for objects detection in any kind of natural images, but they have never been used on document images. The aim of this paper is to study the possibility for active contours to enable the recovering of characters width on degraded character images suffering from discontinuities. This is done using two original kinds of energies, the first one based on the use of punctual attraction forces plot on the degraded areas, and the second one based on the use of an external "ideal" image.