An Optical Model for Show-through Cancellation in Ancient Document Imaging with Dark and Bright Mounts

There is a need to make ancient paper documents from Asian countries such as Japan and China more readable. Many of them have writing or illustrations on both sides for reuse, which can show through the paper. In such documents, it is often difficult to distinguish just the front image because of the ink show-through from the back side. Our aim is to obtain clearer front images by removing the show-through from the back side. Hence, we propose an imaging method that uses dark and bright mounts as well as a prediction step based on a simple optical model. We successfully remove the show-through from the back and extract the images of the front of the document.