Fast correction of bleed-through distortion in grayscale documents by a blind source separation technique

Ancient documents are usually degraded by the presence of strong background artifacts. These are often caused by the so-called bleed-through effect, a pattern that interferes with the main text due to seeping of ink from the reverse side. A similar effect, called show-through and due to the nonperfect opacity of the paper, may appear in scans of even modern, well-preserved documents. These degradations must be removed to improve human or automatic readability. For this purpose, when a color scan of the document is available, we have shown that a simplified linear pattern overlapping model allows us to use very fast blind source separation techniques. This approach, however, cannot be applied to grayscale scans. This is a serious limitation, since many collections in our libraries and archives are now only available as grayscale scans or microfilms. We propose here a new model for bleed-through in grayscale document images, based on the availability of the recto and verso pages, and show that blind source separation can be successfully applied in this case too. Some experiments with real-ancient documents are presented and described.