Vertical black line removal implementation

A vertical black line removal system (VBLR) is adapted to remove unwanted vertical lines produced on scanned document images by dust or other particles on the imaging apparatus. The VBLR system, placed in a document scanner after the binarization equipment, creates a stored histogram table including the difference values of "1" or "0" for the first and second image data. A vertical black line search processor compares each histogram value in the histogram table with a predetermined threshold value such that when the histogram value is greater than the threshold value the histogram value and the image address indicating the location of defect are stored in memory. An image readout then creates a corrected image by comparing each original image address with the stored defect image addresses so that when there is not a match with defect image addresses the first binary image value is output, and when the addresses are equal the difference value is analyzed for a "1" or "0" to determine when the first or second image data is to be output.