In recent years, the preservation of handwritten historical documents and scripts archived by digitized images has been gradually emphasized. However, the selection of different thicknesses of the paper for printing or writing is likely to make the content of the back page seep into the front page. In order to solve this, a cost-efficient document image system is proposed. In this system, the authors use Adaptive Directional Lifting-Based Discrete Wavelet Transform to transform image data from spatial domain to frequency domain and perform on high and low frequencies, respectively. For low frequencies, the authors use local threshold to remove most background information. For high frequencies, they use modified Least Mean Square training algorithm to produce a unique weighted mask and perform convolution on original frequency, respectively. Afterward, Inverse Adaptive Directional Lifting-Based Discrete Wavelet Transform is performed to reconstruct the four subband images to a resulting image with original size. Finally, a global binarization method, Otsu’s method, is applied to transform a gray scale image to a binary image as the output result. The results show that the difference in operation time of this work between a personal computer (PC) and Raspberry Pi is little. Therefore, the proposed cost-efficient document image system which performed on Raspberry Pi embedded platform has the same performance and obtains the same results as those performed on a PC.