From a07ec324fe01bcf93c00bc4463619d1500c3f466 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Eric Gullickson <16152721+ericgullickson@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2026 21:23:43 -0600
Subject: [PATCH] fix: use min-channel grayscale and morphological cleanup for
 VIN OCR (refs #113)

Replace std-based channel selection (which incorrectly picked green for
green-tinted VIN stickers) with per-pixel min(B,G,R). White text stays
255 in all channels while colored backgrounds drop to their weakest
channel value, giving 2x contrast improvement. Add morphological
opening after thresholding to remove noise speckles from car body
surface that were confusing Tesseract's page segmentation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---
 ocr/app/preprocessors/vin_preprocessor.py | 61 +++++++++++++----------
 1 file changed, 34 insertions(+), 27 deletions(-)

diff --git a/ocr/app/preprocessors/vin_preprocessor.py b/ocr/app/preprocessors/vin_preprocessor.py
index aee5a86..cd9b388 100644
--- a/ocr/app/preprocessors/vin_preprocessor.py
+++ b/ocr/app/preprocessors/vin_preprocessor.py
@@ -115,6 +115,7 @@ class VinPreprocessor:
         # Apply adaptive thresholding
         if apply_threshold:
             gray = self._adaptive_threshold(gray)
+            gray = self._morphological_cleanup(gray)
             steps_applied.append("threshold")
 
         # Convert back to PNG bytes
@@ -152,43 +153,34 @@ class VinPreprocessor:
 
     def _best_contrast_channel(self, bgr_image: np.ndarray) -> np.ndarray:
         """
-        Select the single color channel with the highest contrast.
+        Compute a grayscale image that maximizes text-to-background contrast.
 
-        Standard grayscale conversion (0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B) averages
-        channels, which destroys contrast when text and background differ
-        primarily in one channel.  For example, white text on a green VIN
-        sticker has almost identical luminance, but the blue and red channels
-        show strong contrast.
+        Uses per-pixel minimum across B, G, R channels.  White text has
+        min(255,255,255) = 255 regardless of channel, while any colored
+        background has a low value in at least one channel (e.g. green
+        sticker: min(130,230,150) = 130).  This gives ~125 units of
+        contrast vs ~60 from standard grayscale.
 
-        This method evaluates each BGR channel by its standard deviation
-        (a proxy for contrast) and returns the one with the highest value.
-        Falls back to standard grayscale when all channels are similar.
+        Falls back to standard grayscale when the min-channel doesn't
+        improve contrast (i.e. for already-neutral/gray images).
         """
         b_channel, g_channel, r_channel = cv2.split(bgr_image)
 
-        stds = [
-            float(np.std(b_channel)),
-            float(np.std(g_channel)),
-            float(np.std(r_channel)),
-        ]
-        channels = [b_channel, g_channel, r_channel]
-        channel_names = ["blue", "green", "red"]
+        min_channel = np.minimum(np.minimum(b_channel, g_channel), r_channel)
 
-        best_idx = int(np.argmax(stds))
-        max_std = stds[best_idx]
-        min_std = min(stds)
+        min_std = float(np.std(min_channel))
+        gray = cv2.cvtColor(bgr_image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
+        gray_std = float(np.std(gray))
 
-        # Only use single-channel extraction when one channel is notably
-        # better (>20% higher std than the weakest).  Otherwise, standard
-        # grayscale is fine and more robust for neutral-colored images.
-        if max_std > 0 and (max_std - min_std) / max_std > 0.20:
+        # Use min-channel when it provides meaningfully more contrast
+        if min_std > gray_std * 1.1:
             logger.debug(
-                "Using %s channel (std=%.1f) over grayscale (stds: B=%.1f G=%.1f R=%.1f)",
-                channel_names[best_idx], max_std, stds[0], stds[1], stds[2],
+                "Using min-channel (std=%.1f) over grayscale (std=%.1f)",
+                min_std, gray_std,
             )
-            return channels[best_idx]
+            return min_channel
 
-        return cv2.cvtColor(bgr_image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
+        return gray
 
     def _apply_clahe(self, image: np.ndarray) -> np.ndarray:
         """
@@ -309,6 +301,20 @@ class VinPreprocessor:
             logger.warning(f"Adaptive threshold failed: {e}")
             return image
 
+    def _morphological_cleanup(self, image: np.ndarray) -> np.ndarray:
+        """
+        Remove small noise artifacts from a thresholded binary image.
+
+        Morphological opening (erosion then dilation) removes isolated
+        pixels and thin noise lines while preserving larger text characters.
+        """
+        try:
+            kernel = cv2.getStructuringElement(cv2.MORPH_RECT, (2, 2))
+            return cv2.morphologyEx(image, cv2.MORPH_OPEN, kernel)
+        except cv2.error as e:
+            logger.warning(f"Morphological cleanup failed: {e}")
+            return image
+
     def _otsu_threshold(self, image: np.ndarray) -> np.ndarray:
         """
         Apply Otsu's thresholding for binarization.
@@ -361,6 +367,7 @@ class VinPreprocessor:
         steps_applied.append("denoise")
 
         gray = self._otsu_threshold(gray)
+        gray = self._morphological_cleanup(gray)
         steps_applied.append("otsu_threshold")
 
         result_image = Image.fromarray(gray)