Restoration of Faxed Images Degraded by Noises

The importance of fax imagerestoration is constantly increasing with the widespreasd use of facsimile machines in almost every sector of modern society. Recently, Handley and Doutherty proposed a morphological method for restoration of fax images, Their method removed effectively the only salient noise in the fax images. However, it could not remove the white and pepper noise that can appear in fax images since they treated fax images as deterministic sequences rather than random fields. Furthermore, this approach suffers from computational burden since it does not use recursive restoration technique. To cope with those difficulties, in this paper, we propose a new restoration scheme for restoring fax images using Kalman fitering which provides and efficient recursive processor. The proposed restoration method is based on the wide-sense Markov random fields (WSM).In order to verify the performance of the proposed restoration method, several experiments with the CCITT Group 3 fax machine were conducted with the generated document .Experimental results revealed that our proposed restoration method was shown to be superior to Handley et.al's method for restoring fax images.