Title: Modelling of ink-colour degradation on old printed documents

Authors: Biswajit Halder; Abhoy Chand Mondal

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Burdhwan, Burdhwan, W. Bengal, India ' Department of Computer Science, University of Burdhwan, Burdhwan, W. Bengal, India

Abstract: Determination of ink age in documents is crucial for many applications including the forensic ones. The degradation in ink-colour has an important role for this purpose. This paper attempts to model the degradation of ink-colour in documents. Such a model is not only helpful for determination of ink age and it gives a better insight about how colour of a document changes over time. The mathematical foundation for the proposed model is borrowed from an optimisation technique called ant colony optimisation. From a set of 200 documents distributed over five decades (30s to 70s decades) the model, under certain assumptions, tries to find an optimised path through which the majority of documents starting at 30s pass through intermediate decades to reach at 70s. Estimation of the model parameters and use of this model for: 1) determination of ink age; 2) prediction of a document's condition after certain years are discussed in details. Two types of digitised old magazines cover pages are considered for our experiment. The first one is used for construct the model and the second one is used for verification.

Keywords: ant colony optimisation; ACO; meta-heuristic model; image processing; ink-age.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2017.084980

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2017 Vol.7 No.4, pp.398 - 410

Received: 05 Jun 2014
Accepted: 13 Dec 2014
Published online: 10 Jul 2017 *

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