A Hybrid-Binarization Approach for Degraded Document Enhancement

Abstract

Images get degraded because of unbalanced enlightenment including text-smearing, ink-bleeding, degradation of ink over time, manuscript characters from background coming out and blended with the characters of the main side etc. So, degraded-document enhancement is a challenging issue. In recent years, several binarization approaches are proposed to enhance these images. These techniques have focused on finding a suitable global threshold value or a local threshold value for every region to eliminate the degradations. A hybrid approach can be a good solution to deal with all these matters together. This paper proposes a hybrid approach of binarization for degraded documents to produce better quality result. Then, the performance of the proposed technique is evaluated using DIBCO 2010 to DIBCO 2018 databases and compared with the existing methods which confirmed that the proposed method is robust, efficient. Finally, a direction towards future works and challenges is stated.