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?

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.

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