Enhancement and Retrieval of Historic Inscription Images

In this paper we have presented a technique for enhancement and retrieval of historic inscription images. Inscription images in general have no distinction between the text layer and background layer due to absence of color difference and possess highly correlated signals and noise; pertaining to which retrieval of such images using search based on feature matching returns inaccurate results. Hence, there is a need to first enhance the readability and then binarize the images to create a digital database for retrieval. Our technique provides a suitable method for the same, by separating the text layer from the non-text layer using the proposed cumulants based Blind Source Extraction(BSE) method, and store them in a digital library with their corresponding historic information. These images are retrieved from database using image search based on Bag-of-Words(BoW) method.