A Recursive Approach For Bleed-Through removal

Historical documents are valuable resources worth to be preserved in order to support our cultural and social knowledge. Unfortunately, these supports based on fragile materials are often affected by several types of degradations. Applying restoration techniques on degraded captured digital images of historical documents may be a quick and efficient way to preserve the document and avoid the loss in its content. This paper presents a new method to restore a particular type of degradation which is referred to as "bleed-through". This degradation is caused by the interference of characters from the reverse side with the text to be read. Our proposed method is based on a recursive approach that relies on two types of analysis: the Principal Component Analysis and the k-means clustering algorithm. The aim here is to extract clear textural images from these interfering and overlapping areas of text. Our restoration method analyses the front side image alone and corrects the unneeded image components. This paper concludes with some experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.