Non-rigid registration and restoration of double-sided historical manuscripts

Abstract

This paper presents a fully automatic framework for the restoration of double-sided historical manuscripts which are impaired by ink bleed-through distortions. First, the recto side and the verso side of a manuscript are precisely registered with a non-rigid registration method. The registration procedure selects salient control points as features, employs a free-form transformation model as mapping function and uses residual complexity as similarity measure. Next, we extract prominent foreground feature images with the two registered images. By referring to the feature images, we iteratively perform wavelet decomposition and construction to smear bleed-through interferences and to enhance foreground texts on the manuscript. We test the proposed framework with real manuscripts from the archives and the experimental results are encouraging. © 2011 IEEE.