Performance Analysis of Fuzzy based Restoration Technique for Ink Bleed-through Degraded Documents

Abstract

Historical manuscripts are written several hundreds of years ago and are available in the various forms like palm leaves, parchments, wood, stone inscriptions etc. These manuscripts are now undergoing quality degradation due to the factors like physical, weather conditions etc. Digitization is the only way to preserve these manuscripts. Perhaps, in the process of digitalization due to the background colour as well as the other noisy disturbances, the digital image suffers from degradation. Many research works have already been done on the palm leaf manuscripts earlier till now. Here, the proposed research work aims at the restoration of degraded papers in various manuscripts types. In the medieval manuscripts typically written on historical paper, most of them are composed by both sides, as the front and back. Though many specific problems were arising due to the above, bleed-through of the ink from the backside to the front end of the historic document is the one considered for this proposed research. This bleed-through typically performs the possible reading or deciphering the valuable information on those specific pages with considerable difficulty. In existing systems, Independent Component Analysis, Image Enhancement techniques and thresholding methods have been used and typically the results obtained are poor. Hence, the proposed work aims at developing the Ink bleed-through removal from degraded documents employing the fuzzy based technique. The input parameters are preprocessed and then applied to the Fuzzy inference system. At this juncture, the parameters are fuzzified and given to the inference engine with the rule base. The fuzzy output is then defuzzified to obtain the desired output.