Literature on noise removal in OCR applications Could someone point out the core texts or articles most useful on techniques for the removal of noise from scanned text for OCR applications?
Google research has some excellent papers, see for example:

An Overview of the Tesseract OCR Engine

Also, it seems that stackoverflow has a similar question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4180629/ocr-and-image-preprocessing-techniques

The most powerful image filtering techniques that I'm aware are graph-cuts based, 
which run in the following steps:


Calculate a (sparse) distance matrix between pixels (based on their intensity)
Spectral Clustering, keep only the lowest 3-8 eigenvectors
K-means clustering of the eigenvectors