Enhancement of Degraded Historical Kannada Documents

Historical documents play a vital role in understanding our past and hence need to be preserved. Over the period, these documents tend to possess many variations like stains, strain, ink seepage, dust etc. Image enhancement techniques can be utilized to improve the quality of these images by removing noise and increasing contrast range. The proposed method mainly deals with enhancing the historical document image of palm scripts using gray scale morphological operations with the combination of spatial filters. Morphological opening operation is applied to compensate for non uniform background intensity and suppress bright details smaller than the structural element, while closing suppresses the dark details. The proposed method works well for the images with dark background and low contrast and enhances the image with clear white background.