Correcting show-through effects on document images by multiscale analysis

This paper describes a new approach to restoring color document images where the back image shows through the paper sheet. A new framework is presented for correcting show-through components using digital image processing techniques. First, the foreground components at the front are separated from the background and back components through locally adaptive binarization for each color component and edge magnitude thresholding. Background colors are estimated locally through color thresholding to generate a restored image, and then corrected adaptively through a multi-scale analysis along with comparison of edge distributions between the original and restored images. The proposed method is able to correct the redundant image components by analysing the front image alone. Experimental results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.