Reduction of Bleed-Through Effect in Images of Chinese Bank Items

Because of the existence of possible carbon and seals, it's quite often that images of financial documents such as Chinese bank checks are suffered from bleed-through effects, which will affect the performance of automatic financial document processing such as seal verification and OCR. This paper presents an effective algorithm to deal with bleed-through effects existing in the images of financial documents. Double-sided images scanned simultaneously are used as in-puts, and the bleed-through effect is detected and removed after the registration of the recto and verso side images. There are two major aspects of contribution in our work. First, our algorithm can deal with images with complex background from real-life financial documents while most other algorithms only deal with images with simple background. Second, we combine the fast ICA algorithm with Gatos' local adaptive thresholding algorithm [1] to deal with the bleed-through effects. Experiments show that our proposed algorithm is very promising.