DespeckleHelper

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  Despeckle is the process of removing speckles from images (especially bitmaps created using a scanner). Speckles are artifacts which are extra pixels (or collections of extra pixels) that can occur in scanned images because of imperfections in the scanner hardware, or because of dust or dirt being present on the camera, scanning surface or even the document being scanned.





The document structure analysis and character recognition are usually done in several phases:

scanning

thresholding

skew detection and correction

despeckle or speckle removal

line removal

border removal

detection of preprinted elements (like boxes)

page orientation detection and correction

layout analysis

classification

character recognition



Each step must be completed well enough for the performance of the sequence and result to be successful. Steps that follow the despeckle are inefficient if the correction fails.

DespeckleHelper provides a successful method for automatically improving the quality of document images and a marked decrease in OCR error rates. The method is easy to use - we view it as a pre-OCR cleanup operation, and it takes a very small amount of the computational effort of the OCR process itself.

DespeckleHelper expects as input a monochrome image.