A Review of Digital Image Enhancement Method of Degraded Indian Ancient Manuscripts

One of the oldest medium of writing and communicating in South Asia are palm leaf manuscripts. These are also the major sources for writing and painting in South East Asian countries including Thailand, Nepal, India, Barma, Indonesia etc. Hence it is required to develop an automated system to decipher these inscriptions. The system takes the camera grabbed or scanned images of the inscriptions as an input and processes it before the character recognition is taken up. The images so captured have major problems like the broken letters, erased letters, distortion due to fossils settled and so on. This paper provides a review of various methods for digital enhancement of ancient documents that have gone through degradation process over time. It is concluded that image enhancement using binarization method or thresholding method and other methods is becoming more popular and have significant potential to improve the future image enhancement techniques.