Ink-Bleed Reduction Using Layer Separation

We present a novel method for reducing the effects of ink-bleed in handwritten documents. We go beyond the existing works on ink bleed detection and removal. We consider each pixel in a document as a result of combination of foreground, ink-bleed and background. We carry of a decomposition of the document image into separate foreground ink, ink-bleed, and background Layers. We propose an efficient MRF formulation to achieve this separation. Degradation model for the ink and paper is proposed. The ability to extract the contributions of the three components to each pixel allows us to recover finer details of the writing. Quantitative and qualitative results on a set of historic manuscripts as well as synthetically generated documents demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.