A novel hybrid approach to restore historical degraded documents

Old degraded historical documents carry various important information regarding our culture, economics etc. proper restoration of these documents is very necessary. After digitization of these documents there remain noises and other low resolution components. These affect the overall visual appearance of the documents. In this paper a novel approach is proposed to enhance ancient historical documents. To enhance these digital format documents a two way approach is considered. At first Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and bilateral filter is applied. At second level Non-Linear Enhancement with bilateral filter is applied. Both the approaches are then tested visually and quantitively to show the effectiveness of the approach.