Intensification of old documents and photos by Digital Image Processing Techniques

Historical writings are a beneficial source for derivation of information but they frequently undergo quality depreciation, such as impedance, blurriness, yellowing due to transfer, undistinguishable text, uneven lighting etc. Condition and visibility of these archives can be restored applying a methodology known as Binarization. Binarization (Otsu’s) is divided into global and local thresholding. Moreover, morphological functions like, erosion and dilation are used. The above mentioned techniques toil on the intensity of the scanned images and breaks down each pixel into phases (segmentation) according to their respective threshold values. At first, global thresholding is applied on the image as a whole. Segments of the image often have lingering distortion. Therefore, these parts undergo local thresholding, after which the image goes through a series of histogram functions of brightness, sharpness and contrast. After enhancement of these records they can be reserved in digital libraries for everyone to view. Further, text from text documents can be retrieved using OCR to encapsulate and save essential data.