Scanning double-sided documents without incurring show-through by learning to fuse two complementary images using multilayer perceptron

This paper presents a novel method for scanning duplex-printed documents without incurring the unwanted show-through artifact. The proposed method achieves the goal of eliminating the leaked-out reverse-side content by fusing a white backed scan image with a black backed scan image of the document. The fusion is accomplished using a multilayer perceptron having learned a fusion mapping from manually corrected document images. The main novel contributions of this work include (1) being the first to propose to accomplish the goal of show through free scanning by fusing a white backed scan image with a black backed scan image of the document; (2) proposing a learning approach using a multilayer perceptron to learn the fusion mapping from manually corrected scan images; and (3) proposing to use the pixel value histogram of reverse-side-printed area as well as the pixel value histogram of duplex-printed area to quantitatively indicate show through severity to facilitate objective comparison of the methods in consideration. The experiment results show that the proposed method is remarkably more powerful in eliminating show through than the two state-of-the-art methods in comparison.