Automated Image Enhancement for Document Legibility

OVERVIEW

This invention presents a system and method for enhancing the legibility of degraded images, particularly historical documents, photographs, and handwritten materials. The system automatically transforms degraded images into clear, legible documents by analyzing pixel features and segregating dark from light pixels. One notable application is in preserving important manuscripts and records.

BACKGROUND

Historical documents and images often degrade over time, making it challenging to discern important details. Existing preservation techniques can only slow degradation, but this invention offers a solution by automatically enhancing image legibility without training data or language-specific parameters. This innovation addresses a significant challenge faced by professionals such as librarians, historians, and document recovery specialists

Benefit

• Fully automated enhancement saves time and resources.
• Versatility and language independence make it applicable across various document types and languages.
• Addresses the pressing need to preserve and recover details from historically significant documents.

Market Application

• Document preservation: Ideal for libraries, archives, and historical societies to enhance and preserve valuable documents.
• Document recovery: Useful for organizations involved in recovering and deciphering historical or sensitive documents.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Enhances OCR accuracy by improving the legibility of scanned documents.

Publications

US Issued Patent No. 9,361,676

Automatic Enhancement and Binarization of Degraded Document Images. August 2013, DOI:10.1109/ICDAR.2013.49

Robust binarization of degraded document images using heuristics. December 2013. Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering 9021:90210U, DOI:10.1117/12.2042581