Restoration of double-sided ancient music documents with bleed-through

Abstract

Access to collections of cultural heritage is increasingly becoming a topic of interest for institutions like libraries. With the easy access to information provided by technologies such as the Internet, new ways exist for consulting ancient documents without exposing them to more dangers of degradation. One of those types of documents is written ancient music. These documents suffer from multiple kinds of degradartion, where bleed-through outstands as the most damaging. This paper proposes a new method based on the Takagi Sugeno fuzzy classification algorithm to classify the pixels as bleed-through, after performing a general background restoration. This method is applied to a set of doublesided ancient music documents, and the obtained results compared with methods present in the literature. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.