User-assisted ink-bleed correction for handwritten documents

  • Authors:
  • Yi Huang;Michael S. Brown

  • Affiliations:
  • Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We describe a user-assisted framework for correcting ink-bleed in old handwritten documents housed at the National Archives of Singapore (NAS). Our approach departs from traditional correction techniques that strive for full automation. Fully-automated approaches make assumptions about ink-bleed characteristics that are not valid for all inputs. Furthermore, fully-automated approaches often have to set algorithmic parameters that have no meaning for the end-user. In our system, the user needs only to provide simple examples of ink-bleed, foreground ink, and background. These training examples are used to classify the remaining pixels in the document to produce a computer-generated result that is equal to or better than existing fully-automated approaches. To offer a complete system, we also provide tools that allow any errors in the computer-generated results to be quickly "cleaned up" by the user. The initial training markup, together with the computer-generated results, and manual edits are all recorded with the final output, allowing subsequent viewers to see how a corrected document was created and to make changes or updates. While an ongoing project, our feedback from the NAS staff has been overwhelmingly positive that this user-assisted framework is a practical way to address the ink-bleed problem.