A Novel Illumination-Balance Technique for Improving the Quality of Degraded Text-Photo Images

Content digitization transforms a source into its digital form through digital cameras or scanners. This transformation often leads to the irregular distribution of image illumination, which may distort the quality of digital images. Engineers have provided many mechanisms to solve the degradation problem; however, these works mainly focus on dealing with full text images. In this letter, we propose a novel method to balance the illumination distribution of the transformed image. Experimental results show that the new method is capable of improving the quality of degraded text images. Particularly, unlike related works, the new method can effectively adjust the illumination distribution of a text-photo image to enhance the image quality.