An image correction technique is proposed to remove distortion ,which is featured by background non-uniformity ,geometric distortion and local blurring near binding ,from images scanned from thick books. The method does not rely on any physical parameters of the scanner ,and the correction is performed entirely based on measuring the distorted image. An appropriate sampling window is moved across the image,and a background grey factor is obtained for correction of grey values in the whole image. Taking a curved book edge in the distorted image as reference,a distortion factor is found and used in the interpolation for geometric distortion correction. Finally a space varying high-pass convolution mask is used to sharpen the image in order to alleviate blurring. By establishing relationship between background grey factor and shrinking coefficient to calibrate the scanner, information of the page edge is not needed in correcting other images produced by the same equipment. The corrected images are suitable for human viewing,and OCR recognition ratio is up to 82.6%.