Parameter-free based two-stage method for binarizing degraded document images

  • Authors:

  • Yung-Hsiang Chiu;Kuo-Liang Chung;Wei-Ning Yang;Yong-Huai Huang;Chi-Huang Liao

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, No. 43, Section 4, Keelung Road, Taipei 10607, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, No. 43, Section 4, Keelung Road, Taipei 10607, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, No. 43, Section 4, Keelung Road, Taipei 10607, Taiwan, ROC;Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering, Jinwen University of Science and Technology, No. 99, Anzhong Road, Xindian District, New Taipei City 23154, Taiwan, ROC;System Online Co. Ltd. 8F, No. 247-1, Section 3, Jhong-Siao East Road, Taipei 10654, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Binarization plays an important role in document image processing, especially in degraded documents. For degraded document images, adaptive binarization methods often incorporate local information to determine the binarization threshold for each individual pixel in the document image. We propose a two-stage parameter-free window-based method to binarize the degraded document images. In the first stage, an incremental scheme is used to determine a proper window size beyond which no substantial increase in the local variation of pixel intensities is observed. In the second stage, based on the determined window size, a noise-suppressing scheme delivers the final binarized image by contrasting two binarized images which are produced by two adaptive thresholding schemes which incorporate the local mean gray and gradient values. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive when compared to the existing adaptive binarization methods and achieves better performance in precision, accuracy, and F-measure.