A Procedure for the Correction of Back-to-Front Degradations in Archival Manuscripts with Preservation of the Original Appearance

Abstract

Virtual restoration of digital copies of the human documental heritage is crucial for facilitating both the traditional work of philologists and paleographers and the automatic analysis of the contents. Here we propose a practical and fast procedure for the correction of the typically complex background of recto–verso historical manuscripts. The procedure has two main, distinctive features: it does not need for a preliminary registration of the two page sides, and it is non-invasive, as it does not alter the original appearance of the manuscript. This makes it suitable for the routinary use in the archives, and permits an easier fruition of the manuscripts, without any information being lost. In the first stage, the detection of both the primary text and the spurious strokes is performed via soft segmentation, based on the statistical decorrelation of the two recto and verso images. In the second stage, the noisy pattern is substituted with pixels that simulate the texture of the clean surrounding background, through an efficient technique of image inpainting. As shown in the experimental results, evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively, the proposed procedure is able to perform a fine and selective removal of the degradation, while preserving other informative marks of the manuscript history.