Restoration of Old Manuscripts using Image Processing Techniques

Image processing, one of the rapidly expanding area of present day science and technology, finds useful applications in many fields such as medicine, space, remote sensing and document processing. In this paper a simple and effective method is proposed to preserve and produce restored copies of old and faded manuscripts. The manuscripts are here treated as images and edge detection technique is used for the purpose of restoration of these images. The method is tested by applying it to some artificially degraded documents and to some actual old manuscripts ivolving Arabic, Persian and Urdu text. Hard copies of the original manuscripts obtained after restoration were found to be much better as compared to the original or their xerox copies.