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Despeck

Remove unwanted stamps or watermarks from scanned images

despeck is a Ruby gem that helps you remove unwanted stamps or watermarks from scanned images/PDFs, primarily prior to OCR.

Its image processing operations are based on libvips via the https://github.com/jcupitt/ruby-vips[ruby-vips] Ruby-bindings.

It can be used to:

  • detect uniform watermarks from a series of images,
  • output a watermark pattern file (image, mask) that describes a watermark pattern, and
  • remove a specified watermark pattern from input images regardless of the location of the watermark on these images.

Assumptions on input:

  • The input may be a single image, or a PDF of multiple pages of images
  • In the case of multiple pages, not all pages may have the watermark
  • The input images are assumed to be purely monochrome text-based.
  • The watermarks are colored. For example, if the watermark is a GREEN SQUARE PATTERN, for all the pages that contain this mark, despeck will attempt to detect this pattern and remove them

Installation

Install gem manually

$ gem install despeck

Or add it to your Gemfile

gem 'despeck'

and then run bundle install

OCR

To be able to extract text via despeck ocr command, you'll need to install:

  • Tesseract (3.x)
  • ImageMagick (6.x)
  • Desired languages

Installation instruction can be found here: OCR tools installation guide

Usage (Command Line)

Getting actual help:

# To show general help
despeck -h
despeck remove -h

To remove watermark:

$ despeck remove /path/to/input.jpg /path/to/output.jpg

With the command above, Despeck will try to find the watermark colour, and apply best filter settings to remove the watermark. It may be wrong, so you can pass several parameters to help Despeck with that:

$ despec remove --color 00FF00 --sensitivity 120 --black-const -60 --add-contrast /path/to/input.pdf /path/to/output.pdf
  • --color 00FF00 - to say watermark is ~ green.
  • --sensitivity 120 - increases sensitivity (if with default 100 watermark is still visible).
  • --black-const -60 - by default, Despeck tries to improve text quality by increasing black by -110. This may be too much for you, so you can reduce that number.
  • --add-contrast - disabled by default, increases output image's contrast.
  • --accurate - disabled by default. Applies filters to the area with watermark only, preserving the rest of the image untouched.

Usage

(still under development)

wr = Despeck::WatermarkRemover.new(black_const: -90, resize: 0.01)
# => #<Despeck::WatermarkRemover:0x007f935b5a1a68 @add_contrast=true, @black_const=-110, @watermark_color=nil, @resize=0.1, @sensitivity=100>
image = Vips::Image.new_from_file("/path/to/image.jpg")
# => #<Image 4816x6900 uchar, 3 bands, srgb>
output_image = wr.remove_watermark(image)
# => #<Image 4816x6900 float, 3 bands, b-w>
output_image.write_to_file('/path/to/output.jpg')