Automatic image quality evaluation and correction technique

A process and system for automating the image quality inspection and correction for scanned document which previously required a human operator. For every scanned and thresholded image, the process and system performs an automatic evaluation through a binary image quality detection system which generates an image noise index indicative of the amount of image artifacts or image loss. When a poor quality scanned page is detected, for example, too much speckle noise, the gray scale image is retrieved or the image is rescanned. The gray scale image then automatically undergoes an image quality correction process to produce a clean, readable binary image.