Hand-drawn line removal from Bangla printed document images

Every document holds some sorts of information. Paper documents especially old paper document provide a wealth of information about every aspect of the society and civilization. So these paper documents are being converted to electronic form for better storage, processing and analysis. The people, especially students while reading a book or documents have a tendency to mark important lines through the pen. To preserve these types of documents electronically, these lines need to be removed. This paper proposed a method to remove hand drawn lines from scanned paper document images. As there is no any benchmark database, we also proposed a dataset consisting of document images with hand-drawn lines (made it publicly available). The proposed method is tested on this dataset and the results are encouraging.