Webmaster & BanknoteQueen
Hey, I’ve been building a script to auto‑extract microprinted text from high‑resolution banknote images, but the fonts vary too much. Any tricks for pinpointing those tiny details?
BanknoteQueen: I get it, the microprint is a stubborn little ghost in the grain. First, shoot at the highest DPI you can—no point in chasing details you never captured. Then, dark‑enlighten the image: increase contrast, subtract a blurred version to bring out the fine edges, and play with adaptive thresholding so you don’t drown the tiny lines in noise. A little morphological opening can clean up stray specks, but be careful not to erase the very fonts you’re hunting. If you can, train a tiny OCR model on a handful of reference prints; the neural net will learn the peculiar quirks of each typeface. Finally, don’t forget to manually spot‑check a handful of samples—automation is great, but the human eye still trumps a bot when the stakes are authenticity.