Digital restoration, enhancement, and archiving of photo-documents

The paper presents results of research and development made to create an automated database of archival photo-documents. The proposed approach is realized in a system consisting of three components: (1) a subsystem for document input (for picture transformation to either gray-scale or color digital images); (2) a subsystem for digital image processing (for effective noise suppression, defect elimination and image enhancement); and (3) an archiving subsystem (for effective lossless image compression supplemented with an interface to universal database management system). On the basis of the proposed approach a database prototype of archival photo-documents of Russian Academy of Sciences has been created. The work focuses on the development of economical and portable solutions suitable for both centralized and distributed database architecture allowing Web access.