Renovating Contaminative Image Archives Based on Patch Propagation and Adaptive Confidence Collation

The preservation of classical archives is an essential task in the digitization of culture. So far, there remain two crucial challenges in archiving treasurable but aged image records. The first one is to eliminate a large-scale smudge located in a smooth ground, while the second one is to improve the readability of text content. Undoubtedly, the quality of an aged image is always degraded by antiquated smears, and the same situation occurs to obscure the content of a text image. In this paper, the authors apply the concept of patch propagation to help renovating contaminative images and introduce an adaptive confidence collation strategy to avoid the phenomenon of error diffusion, which often results in serious distortion in repairing. Furthermore, the techniques of Canny detection and center-weighted median filter are adopted in the proposed mechanism to refine the blurry target. In particular, the obscured text of aged images can be improved in the new mechanism, while it is seldom concerned in related works.