Restoration of archival documents using a wavelet technique

Abstract

This paper addresses a problem of restoring handwritten archival documents by recovering their contents from the interfering handwriting on the reverse side caused by the seeping of ink. We present a novel method that works by first matching both sides of a document such that the interfering strokes are mapped with the corresponding strokes originating from the reverse side. This facilitates the identification of the foreground and interfering strokes. A wavelet reconstruction process then iteratively enhances the foreground strokes and smears the interfering strokes so as to strengthen the discriminating capability of an improved Canny edge detector against the interfering strokes. The method has been shown to restore the documents effectively with average precision and recall rates for foreground text extraction at 84 percent and 96 percent, respectively.