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Adaptive binarization of severely degraded and non-uniformly illuminated documents

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Abstract

This paper presents a new adaptive binarization method for the degraded document images. Variable background, non-uniform illumination, and blur caused by humidity are the addressed degradations. The proposed method has four steps: contrast analysis, which calculates the local contrast threshold; contrast stretching, thresholding by computing global threshold; and noise removal to improve the quality of binarized image. Evaluation of proposed method has been done using optical character recognition, visual criteria, and established measures: execution time, F-measure, peak signal-to-noise ratio, negative rate metric, and information to noise difference. Our method is tested on the four types of datasets including Document Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO) series datasets (DIBCO 2009, H-DIBCO 2010, and DIBCO 2011), which include a variety of degraded document images. On the basis of evaluation measures, the results of proposed method are promising and achieved good performance after extensive testing with eight techniques referred in the literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, Uttarakhand, India

    Brij Mohan Singh

  2. Department of Computer Science, IISC, Bangalore, India

    Rahul Sharma

  3. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, 247667, Uttarakhand, India

    Debashis Ghosh

  4. GEU, Dehra Dun, India

    Ankush Mittal

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  1. Brij Mohan Singh
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  2. Rahul Sharma
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  3. Debashis Ghosh
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  4. Ankush Mittal
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Correspondence to Brij Mohan Singh.

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Singh, B.M., Sharma, R., Ghosh, D. et al. Adaptive binarization of severely degraded and non-uniformly illuminated documents. IJDAR 17, 393–412 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-014-0219-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-014-0219-6

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