Integrated Framework for Selecting and Enhancing Ancient Marathi Inscription Images from Stone, Metal Plate, and Paper Documents

TL;DR

This paper introduces an image enhancement framework for ancient Marathi inscriptions on various media, improving readability through binarization and preprocessing, with evaluated classification accuracy improvements.

Contribution

It proposes a novel combination of binarization and preprocessing techniques tailored for ancient Marathi script images, enhancing readability and classification accuracy.

Findings

Achieved up to 65.6% accuracy with K-NN classifier.

Achieved up to 67.8% accuracy with SVM classifier.

Effective in removing stains and enhancing unclear text.

Abstract

Ancient script images often suffer from severe background noise, low contrast, and degradation caused by aging and environmental effects. In many cases, the foreground text and background exhibit similar visual characteristics, making the inscriptions difficult to read. The primary objective of image enhancement is to improve the readability of such degraded ancient images. This paper presents an image enhancement approach based on binarization and complementary preprocessing techniques for removing stains and enhancing unclear ancient text. The proposed methods are evaluated on different types of ancient scripts, including inscriptions on stone, metal plates, and historical documents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves classification accuracies of 55.7%, 62%, and 65.6% for stone, metal plate, and document scripts, respectively, using the K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN) classifier. Using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, accuracies of 53.2%, 59.5%, and 67.8% are obtained. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancement method in improving the readability of ancient Marathi inscription images.