PT Journal AU Mohamed Ali Souibgui Y.Kessentini TI DE-GAN: A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Document Enhancement SO IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence JI TPAMI PY 2022 BP 1180 EP 1191 VL 44 IS 3 DI 10.1109/TPAMI.2020.3022406 AB Documents often exhibit various forms of degradation, which make it hard to be read and substantially deteriorate the performance of an OCR system. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end framework named Document Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks (DE-GAN) that uses the conditional GANs (cGANs) to restore severely degraded document images. To the best of our knowledge, this practice has not been studied within the context of generative adversarial deep networks. We demonstrate that, in different tasks (document clean up, binarization, deblurring and watermark removal), DE-GAN can produce an enhanced version of the degraded document with a high quality. In addition, our approach provides consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods over the widely used DIBCO 2013, DIBCO 2017 and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets, proving its ability to restore a degraded document image to its ideal condition. The obtained results on a wide variety of degradation reveal the flexibility of the proposed model to be exploited in other document enhancement problems. ER