A common technique for removing noise from images is by blur-
ring them with a weighted mean or a Gaussian filter. Through these
processes noise reduction is achieved, but unfortunately, valuable
information is lost and the details of object boundaries are
deformed. A solution to this problem, especially for document
images, is the use of an edge preserving smoothing technique
(adaptive mean filter) where the amount of blurring for each pixel is
determined after gathering local information in a specified
neighborhood . In this approach, we use a simple and effective EPSF, which performs its task with low computation time.
The program is based on the algorithm described in the following paper:
N. Nikolaou and N. Papamarkos "Color reduction for complex document images", International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, Vol. 19 (1) pp. 14-26, 2009.