Directed assistance for ink-bleed reduction in old documents

Ink-bleed interference is a serious problem that affects the legibility of old documents. Ink-bleed can be reduced using pixel classification based on user-supplied markup that labels examples of ink-bleed, foreground-ink, and background. The main challenge is ensuring that the user´s markup sufficiently captures the characteristics of the document. This is particularly troublesome for old documents that can exhibit significant change within the same page. In this paper, we address this markup problem using a “directed assistance” approach in which the user provides a small amount of initial markup. The image is then classified and regions with low classification confidence are grouped and displayed to the user for another round of markup. The key idea is to direct the user to where markup is needed. In addition, local markup can be weighted in the classification algorithm to produce better results.