OpenCV - Removal of noise in image

Question

I have an image here with a table.. In the column on the right the background is filled with noise

How to detect the areas with noise? I only want to apply some kind of

Answer 1

My solution is based on thresholding to get the resulted image in 4 steps.

1. Read image by OpenCV 3.2.0.
2. Apply GaussianBlur() to smooth image especially the region in gray color.
3. Mask the image to change text to white and the rest to black.
4. Invert the masked image to black text in white.

The code is in Python 2.7. It can be changed to C++ easily.

import numpy as np
import cv2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline 

# read Danish doc image 
img = cv2.imread('./imagesStackoverflow/danish_invoice.png')

# apply GaussianBlur to smooth image
blur = cv2.GaussianBlur(img,(5,3), 1) 

# threshhold gray region to white (255,255, 255) and sets the rest to black(0,0,0)
mask=cv2.inRange(blur,(0,0,0),(150,150,150))

# invert the image to have text black-in-white
res = 255 - mask

plt.figure(1)
plt.subplot(121), plt.imshow(img[:,:,::-1]), plt.title('original') 
plt.subplot(122), plt.imshow(blur, cmap='gray'), plt.title('blurred')
plt.figure(2)
plt.subplot(121), plt.imshow(mask, cmap='gray'), plt.title('masked')
plt.subplot(122), plt.imshow(res, cmap='gray'), plt.title('result')
plt.show()

The following is the plotted images by the code for reference.

Here is the result image at 2197 x 3218 pixels.