A combined approach for degraded historical documents denoising using Curvelet and mathematical morphology

India is praised for its rich past and the culture. The rich heritage of the country has been carried over generations through the manuscripts and historic writings. A great deal of effort is being made to prevent their further degradation. A lot of research is also done in finding methods to digitize these documents so that they can be immortalized. But in order to achieve this, the noise in the documents (result of exposure to environmental factors and age) has to be eliminated. This paper deals with one such method aimed at denoising a degraded image. We describe a method to denoise an image using Curvelet and mathematical morphology. Proposed implementation offers reconstruction of the image from the degraded document and edge enhancement by eliminating background.