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An Improved Method for Document Image Binarization


Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, RCC Institute of Information Technology, Kolkata - 700015, West Bengal, India
 

Handwriting analysis of document image has four parts- preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. Image pre-processing technique is used to improve the quality of the image for easily and efficiently processing in future steps. Principal stage of image pre-processing is binarization, according to which the pixels are classified into text and background. It is a crucial stage that can affect further stages including the final character recognition stage. This paper proposed a binarization technique which is based on Otsu which has been already used for handwriting document binarization. But in order to tolerate badly degraded document images, present work proposed a binarization technique with the help of Otsu algorithm, which can segment the foreground from the background if text document is badly degraded, such as uneven illumination, image contrast variation, bleeding-through, and smear. The proposed method was tested on text image of H-DIBCO2012 and DIBCO2009. Experimental results show that proposed technique achieved a high precision that gives better result than the Otsu algorithm.

Keywords

Binarization, Gray Scale Image, Line Segment, Otsu, Threshold.
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  • An Improved Method for Document Image Binarization

Abstract Views: 884  |  PDF Views: 385

Authors

Nilima Paul
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, RCC Institute of Information Technology, Kolkata - 700015, West Bengal, India
Harinandan Tunga
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, RCC Institute of Information Technology, Kolkata - 700015, West Bengal, India

Abstract


Handwriting analysis of document image has four parts- preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. Image pre-processing technique is used to improve the quality of the image for easily and efficiently processing in future steps. Principal stage of image pre-processing is binarization, according to which the pixels are classified into text and background. It is a crucial stage that can affect further stages including the final character recognition stage. This paper proposed a binarization technique which is based on Otsu which has been already used for handwriting document binarization. But in order to tolerate badly degraded document images, present work proposed a binarization technique with the help of Otsu algorithm, which can segment the foreground from the background if text document is badly degraded, such as uneven illumination, image contrast variation, bleeding-through, and smear. The proposed method was tested on text image of H-DIBCO2012 and DIBCO2009. Experimental results show that proposed technique achieved a high precision that gives better result than the Otsu algorithm.

Keywords


Binarization, Gray Scale Image, Line Segment, Otsu, Threshold.

References