removing background noise from an image

[galwaylibrary]

Hi,

I am trying to remove background noise from an image. The foreground is handwritten text, and there are black dots in the background. I am hoping to remove these without affecting the text. I am trying to use 'morphology' to select black areas of certain dimensions, but I am very hazy on this command.

I have posted the image at this web address.

http://places.galwaylibrary.ie/page.png

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards
John

[fmw42]

If on unix (Linux, Mac or Window with Cygwin) see my textcleaner script at the link below. Or use -lat (which is the heart of my script). see
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/comma ... ns.php#lat. You can also try some of the noise filtering functions such as -median or better -morphology open/close. See http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/morphology/#basic