Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation

Ancient manuscripts are a rich source of history and civilization. Unfortunately, these documents are often affected by different age and storage related degradation which impinge on their readability and information contents. In this paper, we propose a document restoration method that removes the...

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Main Authors: Muhammad Hanif, Anna Tonazzini, Syed Fawad Hussain, Akhtar Khalil, Usman Habib
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2023-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10032482/?tool=EBI
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author Muhammad Hanif
Anna Tonazzini
Syed Fawad Hussain
Akhtar Khalil
Usman Habib
author_facet Muhammad Hanif
Anna Tonazzini
Syed Fawad Hussain
Akhtar Khalil
Usman Habib
author_sort Muhammad Hanif
collection DOAJ
description Ancient manuscripts are a rich source of history and civilization. Unfortunately, these documents are often affected by different age and storage related degradation which impinge on their readability and information contents. In this paper, we propose a document restoration method that removes the unwanted interfering degradation patterns from color ancient manuscripts. We exploit different color spaces to highlight the spectral differences in various layers of information usually present in these documents. At each image pixel, the spectral representations of all color spaces are stacked to form a feature vector. PCA is applied to the whole data cube to eliminate correlation of the color planes and enhance separation among the patterns. The reduced data cube, along with the pixel spatial information, is used to perform a pixel based segmentation, where each cluster represents a class of pixels that share similar color properties in the decorrelated color spaces. The interfering, unwanted classes can thus be removed by inpainting their pixels with the background texture. Assuming Gaussian distributions for the various classes, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is estimated through the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm from the data, and then used to find appropriate labels for each pixel. In order to preserve the original appearance of the document and reproduce the background texture, the detected degraded pixels are replaced based on Gaussian conditional simulation, according to the surrounding context. Experiments are shown on manuscripts affected by different kinds of degradations, including manuscripts from the DIBCO 2018 and 2019 publicaly available dataset. We observe that the use of a few PCA dominant components accelerates the clustering process and provides a more accurate segmentation.
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spelling doaj.art-2ace6dd0f1c34adda9b00e727e5de75a2023-03-24T05:32:29ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032023-01-01183Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentationMuhammad HanifAnna TonazziniSyed Fawad HussainAkhtar KhalilUsman HabibAncient manuscripts are a rich source of history and civilization. Unfortunately, these documents are often affected by different age and storage related degradation which impinge on their readability and information contents. In this paper, we propose a document restoration method that removes the unwanted interfering degradation patterns from color ancient manuscripts. We exploit different color spaces to highlight the spectral differences in various layers of information usually present in these documents. At each image pixel, the spectral representations of all color spaces are stacked to form a feature vector. PCA is applied to the whole data cube to eliminate correlation of the color planes and enhance separation among the patterns. The reduced data cube, along with the pixel spatial information, is used to perform a pixel based segmentation, where each cluster represents a class of pixels that share similar color properties in the decorrelated color spaces. The interfering, unwanted classes can thus be removed by inpainting their pixels with the background texture. Assuming Gaussian distributions for the various classes, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is estimated through the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm from the data, and then used to find appropriate labels for each pixel. In order to preserve the original appearance of the document and reproduce the background texture, the detected degraded pixels are replaced based on Gaussian conditional simulation, according to the surrounding context. Experiments are shown on manuscripts affected by different kinds of degradations, including manuscripts from the DIBCO 2018 and 2019 publicaly available dataset. We observe that the use of a few PCA dominant components accelerates the clustering process and provides a more accurate segmentation.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10032482/?tool=EBI
spellingShingle Muhammad Hanif
Anna Tonazzini
Syed Fawad Hussain
Akhtar Khalil
Usman Habib
Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
PLoS ONE
title Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
title_full Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
title_fullStr Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
title_full_unstemmed Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
title_short Restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
title_sort restoration and content analysis of ancient manuscripts via color space based segmentation
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10032482/?tool=EBI
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AT usmanhabib restorationandcontentanalysisofancientmanuscriptsviacolorspacebasedsegmentation