Separating a real-life nonlinear mixture of images

Abstract

This manuscript presents results obtained using an ICA technique in a real-life nonlinear image separation problem: the separation of the images of the two pages of a paper document when the image from the back page shows through, superimposed on the image of the front page. For this manuscript, two images were printed on opposite sides of a sheet of onion skin paper, and then both sides of the sheet were scanned. The scanned images contained a markedly nonlinear mixture of the original images. Nonlinear ICA, using the MISEP technique, was used to recover the original images. It showed to be able to achieve a reasonable, but not perfect separation. The best results were obtained with a separating system which was somewhat customized, based on prior knowledge about the mixture process, and which used explicit regularization. © Springer-Verlag 2004.