An Integrated De-noise and Enhancement Method for Ancient Chinese Tablet Images

Image noise can severely affect Chinese tablet image comprehension. In this paper, a novel integrated denoising and enhancement method for Chinese tablet image is proposed. The method consists of three stages de-noising operations. First, granular bright spots are smoothed by convoluting input Chinese tablet images with the bilateral filter. For obtaining more clear edge detail image, contrast enhancement between the foreground and background of the Chinese tablet image is followed by Top-Hat and Bottom-Hat transformations. Next, a mixture of run-length statistics and connected region techniques is employed to remove the random block noises in the images. Then, two mathematical morphological operators, erosion and dilation, are used to remove small holes and linear noises. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively remove most image noise (including block noise, and linear noise) and preserve characters better than existing methods.