Binarization of degraded document image based on feature space partitioning and classification

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the binarization of degraded document images. We map the image into a 2D feature space in which the text and background pixels are separable, and then we partition this feature space into small regions. These regions are labeled as text or background using the result of a basic binarization algorithm applied on the original image. Finally, each pixel of the image is classified as either text or background based on the label of its corresponding region in the feature space. Our algorithm splits the feature space into text and background regions without using any training dataset. In addition, this algorithm does not need any parameter setting by the user and is appropriate for various types of degraded document images. The proposed algorithm demonstrated superior performance against six well-known algorithms on three datasets.     

Quality evaluation of degraded document images for binarization result prediction

This article proposes an approach to predict the result of binarization algorithms on a given document image according to its state of degradation. Indeed, historical documents suffer from different types of degradation which result in binarization errors. We intend to characterize the degradation of a document image by using different features based on the intensity, quantity and location of the degradation. These features allow us to build prediction models of binarization algorithms that are very accurate according to $R^2$ values and p values. The prediction models are used to select the best binarization algorithm for a given document image. Obviously, this image-by-image strategy improves the binarization of the entire dataset.     

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

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.     

Adaptive thresholding algorithm: Efficient computation technique based on intelligent block detection for degraded document images

Document image binarization involves converting gray level images into binary images, which is a feature that has significantly impacted many portable devices in recent years, including PDAs and mobile camera phones. Given the limited memory space and the computational power of portable devices, reducing the computational complexity of an embedded system is of priority concern. This work presents an efficient document image binarization algorithm with low computational complexity and high performance. Integrating the advantages of global and local methods allows the proposed algorithm to divide the document image into several regions. A threshold surface is then constructed based on the diversity and the intensity of each region to derive the binary image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in providing a promising binarization outcome and low computational cost.     

An adaptive water flow model for binarization of degraded document images

In this paper, we present an adaptive water flow model for the binarization of degraded document images. We regard an image surface as a three-dimensional terrain and pour water on it. The water finds the valleys and fills them. Our algorithm controls the rainfall process, pouring the water, in such a way that the water fills up to half of the valley’s depth. After stopping the rainfall, each wet region represents one character or a noisy component. To segment each character, we labeled the wet regions and regarded them as blobs; since some of the blobs are noisy components, we use a multilayer Perceptron to label each blob as either text or non-text. Since our algorithm classifies the blobs instead of pixels, it preserves stroke connectivity. After several experiments, the proposed binarization algorithm demonstrated superior performance against six well-known algorithms on three sets of degraded document images. The main superiority of our algorithm is on document images with uneven illumination.     

Unsupervised refinement of color and stroke features for text binarization

Color and strokes are the salient features of text regions in an image. In this work, we use both these features as cues, and introduce a novel energy function to formulate the text binarization problem. The minimum of this energy function corresponds to the optimal binarization. We minimize the energy function with an iterative graph cut-based algorithm. Our model is robust to variations in foreground and background as we learn Gaussian mixture models for color and strokes in each iteration of the graph cut. We show results on word images from the challenging ICDAR 2003/2011, born-digital image and street view text datasets, as well as full scene images containing text from ICDAR 2013 datasets, and compare our performance with state-of-the-art methods. Our approach shows significant improvements in performance under a variety of performance measures commonly used to assess text binarization schemes. In addition, our method adapts to diverse document images, like text in videos, handwritten text images.     

Adaptive degraded document image binarization

This paper presents a new adaptive approach for the binarization and enhancement of degraded documents. The proposed method does not require any parameter tuning by the user and can deal with degradations which occur due to shadows, non-uniform illumination, low contrast, large signal-dependent noise, smear and strain. We follow several distinct steps: a pre-processing procedure using a low-pass Wiener filter, a rough estimation of foreground regions, a background surface calculation by interpolating neighboring background intensities, a thresholding by combining the calculated background surface with the original image while incorporating image up-sampling and finally a post-processing step in order to improve the quality of text regions and preserve stroke connectivity. After extensive experiments, our method demonstrated superior performance against four (4) well-known techniques on numerous degraded document images.     

Adaptive binarization method for degraded document images based on surface contrast variation

Document binarization is an important technique in document image analysis and recognition. Generally, binarization methods are ineffective for degraded images. Several binarization methods have been proposed; however, none of them are effective for historical and degraded document images. In this paper, a new binarization method is proposed for degraded document images. The proposed method based on the variance between pixel contrast, it consists of four stages: pre-processing, geometrical feature extraction, feature selection, and post-processing. The proposed method was evaluated based on several visual and statistical experiments. The experiments were conducted using five International Document Image Binarization Contest benchmark datasets specialized for binarization testing. The results compared with five adaptive binarization methods: Niblack, Sauvola thresholding, Sauvola compound algorithm, NICK, and Bataineh. The results show that the proposed method performs better than other methods in all binarization cases.     

Goal-directed evaluation of binarization methods

This paper presents a methodology for evaluation of low-level image analysis methods, using binarization (two-level thresholding) as an example. Binarization of scanned gray scale images is the first step in most document image analysis systems. Selection of an appropriate binarization method for an input image domain is a difficult problem. Typically, a human expert evaluates the binarized images according to his/her visual criteria. However, to conduct an objective evaluation, one needs to investigate how well the subsequent image analysis steps will perform on the binarized image. We call this approach goal-directed evaluation, and it can be used to evaluate other low-level image processing methods as well. Our evaluation of binarization methods is in the context of digit recognition, so we define the performance of the character recognition module as the objective measure. Eleven different locally adaptive binarization methods were evaluated, and Niblack's method gave the best performance     

Document image binarization using background estimation and stroke edges

Document images often suffer from different types of degradation that renders the document image binarization a challenging task. This paper presents a document image binarization technique that segments the text from badly degraded document images accurately. The proposed technique is based on the observations that the text documents usually have a document background of the uniform color and texture and the document text within it has a different intensity level compared with the surrounding document background. Given a document image, the proposed technique first estimates a document background surface through an iterative polynomial smoothing procedure. Different types of document degradation are then compensated by using the estimated document background surface. The text stroke edge is further detected from the compensated document image by using L1-norm image gradient. Finally, the document text is segmented by a local threshold that is estimated based on the detected text stroke edges. The proposed technique was submitted to the recent document image binarization contest (DIBCO) held under the framework of ICDAR 2009 and has achieved the top performance among 43 algorithms that are submitted from 35 international research groups.     

Iterative model-based binarization algorithm for cheque images

Binarization of document images with poor contrast, strong noise, complex patterns, and variable modalities in the gray-scale histograms is a challenging problem. A new binarization algorithm has been developed to address this problem for personal cheque images. The main contribution of this approach is optimizing the binarization of a part of the document image that suffers from noise interference, referred to as the Target Sub-Image (TSI), using information easily extracted from another noise-free part of the same image, referred to as the Model Sub-Image (MSI). Simple spatial features extracted from MSI are used as a model for handwriting strokes. This model captures the underlying characteristics of the writing strokes, and is invariant to the handwriting style or content. This model is then utilized to guide the binarization in the TSI. Another contribution is a new technique for the structural analysis of document images, which we call “Wavelet Partial Reconstruction” (WPR). The algorithm was tested on 4,200 cheque images and the results show significant improvement in binarization quality in comparison with other well-established algorithms. Received: October 10, 2001 / Accepted: May 7, 2002 This research was supported in part by NCR and NSERC's industrial postgraduate scholarship No. 239464. A simplified version of this paper has been presented at ICDAR 2001 [3].     

Intelligent region-based thresholding for color document images with highlighted regions

The study applies an intelligent region-based thresholding method for the binarization of color document images with highlighted regions. The results also indicate that the proposed method can threshold simultaneously when the background is gradually changing, reversed, or inseparable from the foreground, with efficient binarization results. Rather than the traditional method of scanning the entire document at least once, this method intelligently divides a document image into several foreground regions and decides the background range for each foreground region, in order to effectively process the detected document regions. Experimental results demonstrate the high effectiveness of the proposed method in providing promising binarization results with low computational cost. Furthermore, the results of the proposed method are more accurate than global, region-based, local, and hybrid methods. Images were analyzed using MODI OCR measurement data such as recall rate and precision rate. In particular, when test images produced under inadequate illumination are processed using the proposed method, the binarization results of this method have better visual quality and better measurable OCR performance than compared global, region-based, local, and hybrid methods. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can be run in an embedded system due to its simplicity and efficiency.     

Optimal combination of document binarization techniques using a self-organizing map neural network

This paper proposes an integrated system for the binarization of normal and degraded printed documents for the purpose of visualization and recognition of text characters. In degraded documents, where considerable background noise or variation in contrast and illumination exists, there are many pixels that cannot be easily classified as foreground or background pixels. For this reason, it is necessary to perform document binarization by combining and taking into account the results of a set of binarization techniques, especially for document pixels that have high vagueness. The proposed binarization technique takes advantage of the benefits of a set of selected binarization algorithms by combining their results using a Kohonen self-organizing map neural network. Specifically, in the first stage the best parameter values for each independent binarization technique are estimated. In the second stage and in order to take advantage of the binarization information given by the independent techniques, the neural network is fed by the binarization results obtained by those techniques using their estimated best parameter values. This procedure is adaptive because the estimation of the best parameter values depends on the content of images. The proposed binarization technique is extensively tested with a variety of degraded document images. Several experimental and comparative results, exhibiting the performance of the proposed technique, are presented.     

基于卡尔曼滤波改进的精子图像序列分割方法

图像分割是精子图像识别的一项关键技术,在精子运动能力分析中起着至关重要的作用。本文对采集的连续精子图像序列进行灰度化、去噪等预处理后,采用Otsu算法对首幅动物精子图像二值化,对后续图像采用Kalman Filter确定二值化阈值范围,改进Otsu算法求出每一幅图像的适当阈值并进行二值化,缩短算法时间并能保证分割精度。应用形态学消除精子尾部和部分精子之间的粘连现象,通过计算和比较目标面积、形状因子,去除小颗粒杂质以及形状及灰度和精子相似的杂质,为精子运动能力检测提供高质量的分割图像。     

A fast fingerprint image enhancement algorithm using a parabolic mask

The quality of fingerprint images (FIs) varies depending on the image taking method. The performance of automatic fingerprint recognition systems highly depends on the quality of the fingerprint images. In these images often are distorted areas, where the valleys and ridges are not clear and there are discontinuities at in the ridge flows. To overcome these unwanted defects fingerprint recognition systems employ enhancement algorithms to improve the quality of the images. Following, binarization, feature extraction, and matching algorithms are executed on the enhanced image. In real-time systems, the overall execution time has primary importance and therefore, especially the enhancement algorithm must be fast and effective. In this study, we propose a fast filtering method with a mask of parabolic coefficients based on the directions. The experiments executed on FVC2000 have proved that, the algorithm provides faster and better enhancements from those described in the literature.     

Automatic tuning of iterative computation on heterogeneous multiprocessors with ADITHE

This work studies the problem of balancing the workload of iterative algorithms on heterogeneous multiprocessors. An approach, called ADITHE, is proposed and evaluated. Its main features are: (1) using a homogeneous distribution of the workload on the heterogeneous system, the speed of every node is estimated during the first iterations of the algorithm; (2) according to the speed of every node, a new workload distribution is carried out; (3) the remaining iterations of the algorithm are executed. The result of this workload redistribution is that the execution times for every iteration at every node are similar and, consequently, the penalties due to synchronization between nodes at every iteration are mostly eliminated. This approach is appropriate for iterative algorithms with similar workload at every iteration, and with a relevant number of iterations. The high portability of ADITHE is guaranteed because the estimation of speed of nodes is included in the execution of the parallel algorithm. There is a wide variety of iterative algorithms related to science and engineering which can take advantage of ADITHE. An example of this kind of algorithms (morphological processing of hyperspectral images) is considered in this work to evaluate its performance when ADITHE is applied. The analysis of the results shows that ADITHE significantly improves the performance of parallel iterative algorithms on heterogeneous platforms.     

Adaptive tuning of SLIC parameter K

The well-known simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) is the most effective among the existing algorithms for superpixel segmentation, which requires manual tuning of the number of superpixels K. The optimal value of the parameter K of the SLIC algorithm for a given image is yet an open issue. In this work, we present granulometry and quality metrics based methods for adaptive tuning of the parameter K. The proposed granulometric method exploits the weighted average of the image pattern spectrum for the adaptive tuning of the parameter K. In the quality metrics method, we use majority voting scheme based on information, texture and ground truth independent quality metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the K SLIC superpixels from the proposed methods achieved good boundary adherence of the ground truth for the images with high value of the compactness.

     

Sugeno integral generalization applied to improve adaptive image binarization

Classic adaptive binarization methodologies threshold pixels intensity with respect to adjacent pixels exploiting integral images. In turn, integral images are generally computed optimally by using the summed-area-table algorithm (SAT). This document presents a new adaptive binarization technique based on fuzzy integral images. Which, in turn, this technique is supported by an efficient design of a modified SAT for generalized Sugeno fuzzy integrals. We define this methodology as FLAT (Fuzzy Local Adaptive Thresholding). Experimental results show that the proposed methodology produced a better image quality thresholding than well-known global and local thresholding algorithms. We proposed new generalizations of different fuzzy integrals to improve existing results and reaching an accuracy $\approx 0.94$ on a wide dataset. Moreover, due to high performances, these new generalized Sugeno fuzzy integrals created ad hoc for adaptive binarization, can be used as tools for grayscale processing and more complex real-time thresholding applications.     

Method for HDR-like imaging using industrial digital cameras

Dynamic range of the scene can be significantly wider than the dynamic range of an image because of limitations of A/D conversion. In such a situation, numerous details of the scene cannot be adequately shown on the image. Standard industrial digital cameras are equipped with an auto-exposure function that automatically sets both the aperture value and cameras exposure time. When measuring a scene with atypical distribution of light and dark elements, the indicated auto-exposure time may not be optimal. The aim of work was to improve, with minimal cost, the performance of standard industrial digital cameras. We propose a low complexity method for creating HDR-like image using three images captured with different exposure times. The proposed method consists of three algorithms: (1) algorithm for estimating whether the auto-exposure time is optimal, (2) algorithm which determines exposure times for two additional images (one with shorter and another with longer than auto-exposure time), and (3) algorithm for HDR-like imaging based on fusion of three previously obtained images. Method is implemented on FPGA inserted into standard industrial digital camera. Results show that the proposed approach produces high quality HDR-like scene-mapped 8-bit images with minimal computational cost. All improvements may be noticed through the performance evaluation.

     

Adaptive binarization of severely degraded and non-uniformly illuminated documents

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.