  Recovering the original printed texts from a document with added handwritten
annotations in the marginal area is one of the challenging problems, especially
when the original document is not available. Therefore, this paper aims at
salvaging automatically the original document from the annotated document by
detecting and removing any handwritten annotations that appear in the marginal
area of the document without any loss of information. Here a two stage
algorithm is proposed, where in the first stage due to approximate marginal
boundary detection with horizontal and vertical projection profiles, all of the
marginal annotations along with some part of the original printed text that may
appear very close to the marginal boundary are removed. Therefore as a second
stage, using the connected components, a strategy is applied to bring back the
printed text components cropped during the first stage. The proposed method is
validated using a dataset of 50 documents having complex handwritten
annotations, which gives an overall accuracy of 89.01% in removing the marginal
annotations and 97.74% in case of retrieving the original printed text
document.
