Cleaning up speckles around text in a scanned image

I've tried -noise radius and -noise geometry and they don't seem to do what I want at all. I have some b&w images (TIFF G4 Fax compression) with lots of noise around the characters. This noise takes the form of pixel blobs that are 1 pixel wide in most cases.

My desire is to do the following 3 steps (in this order):

1. Whiteout all black pixels that are 1 pixel wide (white pixels to th开发者_JAVA百科e left and right)
2. Whiteout all black pixels that are 1 pixel tall (white pixels above and below)
3. Whiteout all black pixels that are 1 pixel wide (white pixels to the left and right)

Do I have to write code to do this, or can Imagemagick pull it off? If it can, how do you specify the geometry to do it?

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Lacking a lot of good answers here, I put this one to the ImageMagick forum and their response was really good. You can read it here ImageMagick Forum

Morphology proved to be the best answer.

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Blur then sharpen would be the normal technique for speckle noise.

Imagemagik can do both of these - you might have to play with the amoutn of blurring