1. A method for improving appearance of captured bilevel image data, comprising: receiving a degraded input bilevel image; connecting dark pixels in the input image to adjacent dark pixels to form connected components comprising a set of dark pixels connected either diagonally or orthogonally and surrounded by white pixels; performing initial clustering of individual connected components; determining a “most likely” cluster representative by use of a probabilistic model of the scanner used for scanning; and assembling the sets by substituting the “most-likely” cluster representative for each family member of each cluster set to form an output image.