Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.3390/electronics13173539

Publication Title

Electronics

Volume

13

Issue

17

Pages

3539 (1-16)

Abstract

Shipbuilding drawings, crafted manually before the digital era, are vital for historical reference and technical insight. However, their digital versions, stored as scanned PDFs, often contain significant noise, making them unsuitable for use in modern CAD software like AutoCAD. Traditional denoising techniques struggle with the diverse and intense noise found in these documents, which also does not adhere to standard noise models. In this paper, we propose an innovative generative approach tailored for document enhancement, particularly focusing on shipbuilding drawings. For a small, unpaired dataset of clean and noisy shipbuilding drawing documents, we first learn to generate the noise in the dataset based on a CycleGAN model. We then generate multiple paired clean-noisy image pairs using the clean images in the dataset. Finally, we train a Pix2Pix GAN model with these generated image pairs to enhance shipbuilding drawings. Through empirical evaluation on a small Military Sealift Command (MSC) dataset, we demonstrated the superiority of our method in mitigating noise and preserving essential details, offering an effective solution for the restoration and utilization of historical shipbuilding drawings in contemporary digital environments.

Rights

© 2024 by the authors.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Data Availability

Article states: "Data is publicly unavailable due to privacy restrictions."

ORCID

0000-0002-2466-1212 (Uddin), 0000-0003-2542-5454 (Khallouli), 0000-0003-0144-9099 (Sousa-Poza)

Original Publication Citation

Uddin, M. S., Khallouli, W., Sousa-Poza, A., Kovacic, S., & Li, J. (2024). A generative approach for document enhancement with small unpaired data. Electronics, 13(17), 1-16, Article 3539. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13173539

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