The restoration of camera documents through image segmentation

Abstract

This paper presents a document restoration technique that is able to flatten curled document images captured through a digital camera. The proposed method corrects camera images of documents through image partition, which divides distorted text lines into multiple small patches based on the identified vertical stroke boundary (VSB) and the fitted x-line and baseline of text lines. Target rectangles are then constructed through the exploitation of the characters enclosed within the partitioned image patches. With the constructed target rectangles and the partitioned image patches, global geometric distortion is finally removed through the local rectification of partitioned image patches one by one. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is fast, accurate, and easy for implementation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.