An Effective Binarization Method for Readability Improvement of Stain-Affected (degraded) Palm Leaf and other Types of Manuscripts

A stain is any colour change perceived as lying within the manuscript fibres. Eliminating stains is considered as more significant, since it leads to improved manuscript image quality and hence improved readability. The communication describes an improved binarization method for removing stains from severely degraded manuscript images where the text is unclear. The method is tested on manuscript images on different media having different scripts: palm leaf (Grantha), rock (Brahmi), and paper (Modi, Newari, Persian and Roman), and Document Image Binarization Contest datasets. In this work, we obtained 66.27%, 92.15%, 97.90%, 56.23%, 78.62% and 98.91% readability for rock, palm leaf and paper manuscripts respectively.