Character Extraction from Interfering Background - Analysis of Double-Sided Handwritten Archival Documents

The sipping of ink through the pages of certain double-sided handwritten documents after long periods of storage poses a serious problem to human readers or OCR systems. This paper addresses this problem through the recovery of content on the front side of a page from the interfering image caused by the handwriting on the reverse side. First, by adapting the Gaussian stochastic model, the interfering model based on norm-orientation-discontinuity is proposed in analyzing the properties of the interfering strokes. Secondly, an improved canny edge detector with edge norm-orientation similarity constraint is proposed. At the same time, two low thresholds are used to detect edges instead of a single low threshold. This improvement could link weaker foreground edges without introducing noises in the overlapping/overshadowed area. The proposed algorithms perform well regardless of the intensity differences between the image on the front side and the interfering image from the reverse side. T...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICAPR
• Authors: Chew Lim Tan, Ruini Cao, Qian Wang, Peiyi Shen
• Keywords: Canny Edge Detector, Double-sided Interfering Images, ICAPR 2001, Pattern Recognition, Reverse Side