When should I apply image cleanup operations on my document images?

Question

When should I apply image cleanup operations on my document images?

Answer

There are a number of cleanup operations that you can use to make an image more suitable for a particular application. What you observe visually on the image and how you perceive its impact on your project is the most important. For example, if you’re noticing very many random specks on your image, and you’re planning to use OCR, then you may want to try a depseckle or blob removal operation first. If the content in your image looks a bit slanted, you could try a deskew or rotate operation. In some cases, using a line removal operation on forms that have grid fields could be helpful also. The amount of image cleaning you may need to do can very from project to project. There’s not a one shot cleaning operation that will always work for all images. But, observe the nature of the noise and interference in your images to determine what general parameters appear to provide the best results.