PIL - "despeckle" image ?

[Paul McGuire]

On Nov 16, 10:58 pm, shearich... at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi - I have some images which I would like to remove specks from using
> the PIL. I would like to be able to say that if a pixel is in a blob of
> less than n contiguous pixels then all pixels in that blob should be
> removed.
>
> The images are 8 bit images with only 0 and 255 values.
>
> I can think of quite crude ways of doing this but I'm sure there are
> some smart ways of doing it - would anyone be able to point me in the
> right direction ?
>
> Lastly in case it matters the reason I'm doing this is that the images
> are scanned images of sheets of papers on which sample signatures have
> been placed. Typically the signatures are much smaller than the sheets
> of paper so I would like to 'autocrop' the images to remove the white
> space around the signature. At some point in the process the images
> having picked up small islands of pixels (dust on scanner or paper ?)
> which are nowhere near the signature but which are causing my autocrop
> efforts to go awry.
>

What if you break up your sheet into zones of some arbitrary size (1/2"
say), and compute a pixel density?  (Density isn't really required,
since all zones are the same size - raw pixel count per zone will do
just as well.)  Then locate the signature based on the zones with
density above threshold X (determine X by trial and error).  Lastly,
clip within these zones if this is still necessary.

-- Paul