EFDM: Restoration of Single-sided Low-quality Document Images

This paper addresses the problem of restoration and enhancement of very old single-sided document images. At first step, a degradation model is developed for the generation of synthesized degraded document images in both double-sided and single-sided formats. Then, we propose a novel method, which is based on the anisotropic diffusion method (ADM), for restoration of the degradations in single-sided document images. Due to local characteristics of ADM, we empower our method with two flow fields to play the role of global classifiers in separating the meaningful pixels. Also, the new method uses an extra diffusion of background information that provides an efficient and accurate restoration of the interference patterns and degraded backgrounds. The performance of the method is tested on both real samples, from Google Book Search dataset and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, and synthesized samples provided by our degradation model. The results are promising.