Simultaneous denoising and super resolution of document images

In this paper, we propose a unified approach for denoising and super-resolution of document images. The approach is a one shot unpaired technique where a single unpaired example is used as reference for training a SinGAN (Shaham et al., in: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF international conference on computer vision, 2019) model. The training is carried out in 2 steps. First we use a clean reference image to train a SinGAN to learn the characteristics of the clean image. Then we perform super resolution and denoising of given test image using another SinGAN. Our unique formulation of the loss function helps in this task by prompting the generated images to have characteristics similar to the reference clean image. We conduct experiments on publicly available datasets (Kaggle Dirty Documents Images and DIBCO) and obtain promising results. We also evaluate the performance of our model for OCR and obtain a higher recognition rate compared to competing methods.