2021 6th International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT)
Pune, India. Apr 02-04, 2021
Degraded Document Image Binarization using
Novel Background Estimation Technique
Harshit Jindal∗ , Manoj Kumar † , Akhil Tomar
Department of Computer Science Engineering, Delhi Technological University
New Delhi,India
Email: ∗ harshitjindal2000@gmail.com, † mkumarg@dce.ac.in, ‡ akhiltomar098@gmail.com, § ayushmalik03@gmail.com
Abstract—Over the past few decades, the use of scanned
historical document images has increased dramatically, especially
2021 6th International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT) | 978-1-7281-8876-8/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/I2CT51068.2021.9418084
with the emergence of online libraries and standard benchmark
datasets like DIBCO. The historical documents are usually in
very-poor conditions containing noises like large ink stains,
bleed-through, liquid spills, uneven-background, spots, faded-ink,
weak/thin text that makes the task of binarization very difficult.
In this paper, we propose an effective degraded document image
binarization algorithm that performs accurate text segmentation.
Our method first estimates the background utilizing informa-
tion from neighboring pixels and filter smoothening. The next
step is background subtraction that helps in the compensation
of background distortions. The document is segmented using
Otsu thresholding, and then we process the image to remove
the remaining noise and maximize text content using labelled
connected components. Our method outperforms several existing
and widely used binarization algorithms on F-measure, PSNR,
DRD, and pseudo F-measure when evaluated on H-DIBCO 2016
and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets and can very effectively detect faint
characters from a document image.
Index Terms—Document Image Processing, Degraded Docu-
ment Image Binarization, Thresholding, Background estimation,
Noise Removal, Otsu Thresholding, Bilateral Filtering
I. I NTRODUCTION
Image binarization is the pre-processing step required for
digital image processing [1] and analysis tasks like moving
object detection or finding the region of interest in an im-
age like the text in a degraded document [2], [3]. Binary
images take less storage memory, document layout analysis,
document skew detection, and faster computations for the
specific application. The most common way of binarizing an
image is to use a thresholding algorithm that segments the
image into background and foreground based on a globally or
locally computed threshold value for pixel intensities. Ancient
Historical Documents, Manuscripts are stored over the years
in archives, libraries. Over time, their quality is affected due
to several environmental factors like ageing of the paper,
humidity, mishandling by humans, and dust. The presence of
degradations makes the task of binarization of documents and
preserving them digitally a tough job. With increasing interest
in historical document analysis, there has been rapid develop-
ment in document image binarization. Historical documents
have various degradations like faded ink or faint-characters,
bleed-through, uneven illumination, contrast variation, smear.
New techniques keep coming out regularly because there is
no single algorithm that can handle all these degradations
978-1-7281-8876-8/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
‡ and Ayush Malik §
and there is always room for improvement in the quality of
binarization.
According to Sezgin and Sankur in [4], there are six
kinds of thresholding methods, histogram-shape based meth-
ods, spatial methods, clustering-based methods, entropy-based
methods, object-attribute based methods, local methods. We
can also describe the thresholding algorithms as Global or
Local depending on the method used to compute the threshold
value. In global methods [5], a single threshold value is
computed for the image based on entropy, histogram, or a
clustering algorithm that segments the image into two classes:
foreground(text) and background. Whereas local thresholding
algorithms [6] divide the image into subparts and use the infor-
mation from neighboring pixels in a small fixed-sized window
of the image to determine the threshold locally for one subpart
at a time. Global thresholding methods efficiently extract text
from high-quality documents. But their performance starts to
lag when degradations are present and adaptive thresholding
algorithms that make a local estimate of the threshold for each
pixel produce better results.
Over time several algorithms have been proposed to convert
ancient images into their binary form, Global thresholding
algorithms like Otsu [7], Kittler [8], etc., and Local thresh-
olding algorithms like Niblack [9], Sauvola [10], etc. Otsu’s
method performs well with images having a bimodal his-
togram but can’t handle degradations like uneven illumination,
bleed-through, or fainting text. Kittler’s algorithm assumes a
gaussian distribution of pixel values for each pixel level to
find the segmentation cut-off and works well for high-quality
documents. Niblack’s method calculates the mean and standard
deviation in a fixed-sized window for each pixel and hence
computes a local threshold. It effectively recognizes text but
introduces tons of noise. Sauvola tried to modify Niblack’s
method to reduce noise which gave better results in some
cases. But, it also resulted in a lower text detection rate.
Many methods have incorporated these algorithms and other
techniques like contrast normalization, background estimation,
stroke-width detection to form hybrid algorithms that perform
much better than individual algorithms. Before, moving to
our approach we discuss the development of such binarization
algorithms. Kim et al. [14]consider the image as a 3d terrain
on which water is poured to fill valleys representing text.
The water-filled image is subtracted from the original image
followed by Otsu’s method to form the final binarization
1
 result and we get a nature-inspired unique hybrid binarization
algorithm. Adaptive local thresholding algorithm also utilizes
the document-specific domain knowledge. Gatos et al. [15]
make use of the Weiner filter to pre-process the input image
and then the Sauvola’s algorithm to estimate the background.
The difference between the pre-processed image and the
estimated background gives an intermediate result which is
finally passed through post-processing to produce the final
result. Although this algorithm is better than Sauvola, it is
still unable to process bleed-through or recover faint characters
from the image. After this came, Lu’s [16] Iterative polynomial
smoothening-based background-estimation algorithm. It then
makes use of a normalized image thresholded by Otsu to detect
the text-stroke width. The final result is produced by local
thresholding information based on the detected stroke edges
and the mean intensity. This method won the first DIBCO
(a) competition (DIBCO 2009) [11] but still, it’s not perfect. This
method is based on the local contrast and hence sometimes
high contrast background is difficult to handle. Su et al. [17]
used minimum and maximum intensity in the local window to
form a contrast image and then binarized it to detect text edges
and were able to produce better results than Lu. This method
unlike Lu performed well on documents with bleed-through
but this also suffers from the faint text.
Nina’s binarization algorithm [18] was a six staged back-
ground estimation based algorithm that used median filtering
for background estimation, bilateral filter, recursive Otsu,
contrast compensation, and despeckling. This algorithm can
effectively capture all the text edges. Singh et al. [19] proposed
(b) an adaptive four-step method that includes contrast stretch-
ing, contrast analysis, thresholding, and noise removal from
the document image. It works very well with most of the
degradations but fails when the image suffers from bleed-
through.Howe’s algorithm [20] was one of the first automatic
parameter tuning based complex binarization algorithm. It
used graph-cut computation to minimize the energy function
based on the Laplacian of pixel intensities. It is a very efficient
method that performs well and autotunes itself on different
kinds of images. But this method also like others performs
poorly on faint text characters and sometimes even introduces
background noise. A recent method that won DIBCO 2018
[13]. (Wei. et al.) [21] makes use of morphological black
(c) hat transformation to compensate the document background
using a disc-shaped structuring element of a size determined
by stroke width transform. Howe’s binarization algorithm is
then applied to form a binary image which is further enhanced
by post-processing that reduces noise and also preserves the
text stroke-width.
Our motivation came from the consideration of the amount
of ink wasted in Xerox due to poor binarization and the
challenging task of detecting faint characters, removal of
(d)
bleed-through text from handwritten document images. The
Fig. 1: Degraded Handwritten Document images from DIBCO proposed algorithm combines several steps like background
dataset [11], [12], [13]illustrating various degradations like estimation, smoothening filters, thresholding (Otsu), and post-
contrast variation in (a), smear in (b), faint ink in (c), and processing steps. It first estimates the background utilizing the
bleed-through in (d). information from neighboring pixels to get an estimate of the

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 current pixel value and moves similarly for the rest of the
pixels. The estimated background image is then smoothened
using a bilateral filter that reduces random noises from the
estimated background. Then we extract the text using a global
thresholding method(Otsu) and finally, the image is processed
further to get rid of the remaining noise. This paper’s major
contribution is the algorithm’s ability to detect bold and faint
text characters from handwritten documents very effectively
just by adjusting the parameters of the background estimation
while still being able to process bleed-through, smear, and
(a) Original Image (b) Ground Truth Image
other degradations.
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows:
In Section II, we present our proposed algorithm in detail.
Section III demonstrates and describes the experimental re-
sults. Finally, we conclude in Section IV.
II. PROPOSED METHOD
Our method utilizes existing techniques and combines them
with our technique to form a novel document image bi-
narization method. It includes the use of a novel iterative
sliding-window based background estimation method, bilateral (c) Nina (d) Otsu
filter [22], Otsu thresholding, and effective post-processing to
remove the remaining noise from the image. Our proposed
binarization algorithm consists of the following steps:
1) Conversion of the Image to Grayscale
2) Background Estimation and Removal
3) Gaussian Smoothing
4) Otsu Thresholding
5) Spotting Removal
A. Conversion of the Image to Grayscale
Historical documents usually do not have the dynamic color (e) Niblack (f) Sauvola
range and hence it is not a good idea to process them in
the colored form with millions of color intensities. Different
documents have different colors and it is a good idea to
convert all to the same color to ensure that all documents are
processed in the same manner. Hence, we convert the image
to a grayscale form where there are only 28 unique intensities.
B. Background Estimation and Removal
After we have converted the image to grayscale form, we
first try to remove as much background noise as possible
by forming an accurate estimation of the background. Our (g) Lu (h) Proposed Algorithm
background estimation method is based on the assumption that Fig. 2: Image H03 from DIBCO 2009 dataset with comparison
the text color varies significantly from the background color.
Usually, either the text is dark and the background is light or
vice-versa. The neighboring pixels thus can provide a good θ = Imin (x, y)/Imax (x, y) (3)
approximation of the local background of a pixel. We utilize
this information i.e. pixels with minimum and maximum I(x, y) = Imin (x, y) + Imax (x, y)(1 − θ)γ (4)
intensity in the local neighbourhood to form an iterative
Equation (1) and (2) represents the calculation of maximum
sliding window background estimation algorithm based on the
and minimum intensity pixel into a (2w+1 x 2w+1) sized
following equation:
window around the current pixel with coordinates (x, y). Equa-
Imax (x, y) = max(I(xc , yc )) (1) tion (3) represents the calculation of the intensity ratio factor
θ. Once we calculate Imax , Imin , θ inside the window, the
Imin (x, y) = min(I(xc , yc )) (2)
background estimation for the current pixel is then calculated
xc (x − w : x + w), yc (y − w : y + w) using Equation (4) where γ is a constant. This process is

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 repeated iteratively for each pixel for n iterations. The reason
for doing multiple iterations is the fact that bold/thick text
doesn’t fade away with one iteration and hence hampers the
text when performing background subtraction and results in
poor performance.

Algorithm: (a) Step 1: Original Image (Grayscale)

1) I(x,y): Original Image;
2) w: (window size)/2;
3) n: number of iterations;
4) C(x,y): Copy of Original Image
5) BG(x,y): Estimated Background Image
6) For k=1 to n: (b) Step 2.1: Background Estimation
7) Slide window over each pixel and compute:
8) Imin = minimum intensity pixel(Window)
9) Imax = maximum intensity pixel(Window)
10) θ = Imin /Imax
11) BG[i][j]=Imin + Imax (1 − θ)γ
12) Store background image as new copy of image.
13) Apply a bilateral filter to estimated background image. (c) Step 2.2: Background Removal
Typically, the value of constant γ can vary from 1.3 to 2.5.
But, we have used the γ = 1.5 so that our algorithm works well
for dark as well as faint text and it also helps to reduce the
number of parameters that need to be tuned. We suggest using
a small window size like 5x5 for images with bold and dark
visible text whereas large window sizes varying from 50*50
(d) Step 2.3: Inversion of Output from Step 2.2
for faint text characters. The number of iterations is subjected
to the difference between text and background intensity. A
higher difference means more iterations for complete estima-
tion.To remove the remaining noise and pixel-level irregular-
ities inside the estimated background we use a bilateral filter
over the estimated background image BG(x,y). We set σColor
= 30 and σSpace = 30.These parameters have been tuned on H- (e) Step 3: Gaussian Smoothening
DIBCO 2018 and perform well for H-DIBCO 2016 [23] too.
The filtering effect is not so much visible on the background
image but has a profound effect on binarization results. Now
that we have the final estimated background image BG we
move forward to the step of background removal. We remove
the background by subtraction of the original image from it.
Before moving on to the Gaussian smoothing we invert the
(f) Step 4: Otsu Thresholding
image for further processing. The background removal process
can be summarised as:

Inew (x, y) = 255 − ([BG(x, y) − I(x, y)]) (5)

(g) Step 5: Spotting Removal and Inversion

C. Gaussian Smoothing
The background removal process introduces random pixel
noise in the newly formed image disrupting the final output.
So, before proceeding with thresholding, the image is passed
through a Gaussian filter to remove these isolated black and
white pixels. We have used a 5x5 gaussian kernel to filter the
noise. This helps in greatly improving the binarization results.
Fig. 3: Overview of Binarization Algorithm. Fig 3(a) shows
the input image which is already in grayscale. Fig 3(b)-
3(d) represents the background estimation and removal step.
Fig 3(e) shows the image after the removal of noise using
gaussian smoothing. Otsu thresholding is then used to create
an initial binarization in 3(f). Finally, we use spotting removal
to generate the final binarization.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 D. Otsu Thresholding
We use Otsu Thresholding for the binarization of our gaus-
sian smoothened image. Otsu Thresholding is a global thresh-
olding method used to separate text from the background. It
minimizes the interclass variance between the foreground and
background class or we can say maximizing the intraclass
variance.
2 Fig.5 show results of our algorithm on images from H-DIBCO
σB (T ) = w1 (T )w2 (T )[μ1 (T ) − μ2 (T )]2
2
Here σB represents the between-class variance, we compute
it for each threshold T from 0 to 255 and select the one that
gives the maximum result. wi is used to represent total pixels
in the background/foreground class. μi represents the mean
intensity for both the classes. Otsu thresholding helps us to
form a pretty good approximation of the text and background
but there can still be remaining noise that needs to be removed.
E. Spotting Removal
Spotting removal is the effective post-processing technique
we use to remove all the remaining noise from our binary
image. We do this by labelling all the connected black(text)
components inside the binary image and then removing all
the components of small size that are introduced while bina-
rizing the image. Removing these small components may also
remove some of the textual parts like a dot over a letter but
ultimately it helps in making the binarized image clean. We
select the size we want to discard manually according to the
text size in an image because there is no fixed text size in
handwritten documents, the dot over a character can be more
than 300 pixels in one image and less than 20 pixels in another
and we want to remove the maximum amount of noise possible
from our binarized document. Lastly, We also take care of very
large size degradations that are falsely detected as text and are
much larger as compared to the text pixel components present
inside the image. This can be any kind of degradation like a
thick border at the corner of the document, a large ink/coffee
stain, or random large spots that are often dark and hence
misclassified as text. This can be easily selected according to
the text size. After this, we invert the image back to make
the text dark and the background white. Fig 3(f) shows the
final binarization results after this post-processing(stopping
removal) step. It shows how post-processing has taken care
of most of the thresholding misclassification errors.
III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
DIBCO datasets have images that suffer from various types
of degradations and also provide the ground truth image to
compare different binarization methods. These datasets consist
of both degraded handwritten and printed documents. We have
used images from H-DIBCO 2018 dataset to develop the
algorithms as they cover a vast variety of degradations and then
used it for testing the images from the H-DIBCO 2016 as well
as the DIBCO 2018 dataset. We first present the qualitative
results and the quantitative comparison of our method with
many state-of-the-art algorithms on the H-DIBCO 2016 and
H-DIBCO 2018 datasets.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
A. Qualitative Results
In Fig. 2 we have compared the results of our method
with Sauvola, Nina, Lu, Niblack, Otsu’s method. Lu’s, Nina’s
method and our proposed method produce good binarization
results but Lu’s method has made the text bold and Nina’s
method suffers from weak stroke detection but our method can
produce an image close to the ground truth image. Fig. 4 and
(6)
2016 & 2018 datasets along with the ground truth images.
Images consist of different kinds of degradations like large
ink spots, thick borders, smear, severe bleed-through, faint text
characters, folded pages, torn out pages, uneven illumination,
smudge, shadows, low-contrast, water spilling, etc. As evident
from the results, our algorithm handles all these degradations
very well and can produce clean binary images with efficiently
extracted text.
Before moving on to the Quantitative Results, We would
first describe the evaluation measures used from DIBCO
reports. DIBCO uses various benchmark evaluation methods
that use mathematical calculations to measure the efficiency,
accurateness of an approach in obtaining the results against
the ground truth images. DIBCO 2016 and 2018 compe-
tition compute 8 statistic evaluation measures: F-measure,
Pseudo F-measure, PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) [24],
DRD(Distance Reciprocal Distortion) [25], Precision, Recall,
Pseudo Precision, and Pseudo Recall.It uses the four of them
to decide the winner.
F-measure is calculated using two components: the pre-
cision and recall of image binarization which is obtained
by counting pixels that are classified black and white cor-
rectly/incorrectly while binarizing against the ground truth
images. F-measure is calculated as the harmonics mean of
recall and precision.
precision ∗ recall
F1 = 2 ∗ (7)
precision + recall
where Recall =(TP)/(TP + FN) and Precision=TP/(TP+ FP).
TP, TN, FP, FN denotes the True Positive, True Negative, False
Positive, and False Negative values, respectively.
pF-measure or pseudo F-measure is a way of measuring
performance similar to F-measure. The only difference being,
it uses the pseudo function instead of the normal recall and
precision functions. This pseudo function uses the weighted
distance between the output image as boundaries of characters
in the ground truth image and the boundary of characters in
the extracted document. It also takes into account the local
stroke width of characters.
PSNR is the relation or measure of the amount of signal
in an image w.r.t amount of noise available. The higher value
of PSNR implies a better signal in comparison to noise. It
is used to measure the degree of reconstruction of bad lossy
compression. It is really useful in the case of binarization as it
can be used to measure the quality of binarization against the
initial image. It helps to quantify the similarity of two images.
C2
P SN R = 10log( ) (8)
M SE
 (a) Image 5 from DIBCO 2016 dataset (a) Image 1 from DIBCO 2018 dataset

(b) Ground Truth Image (b) Ground Truth Image

(c) Binarized Result (c) Binarized Result

(d) Image 2 from DIBCO 2016 dataset (d) Image 5 from DIBCO 2018 dataset

(e) Ground Truth Image (e) Ground Truth Image

(f) Binarized Result (f) Binarized Result

Fig. 4: Images from DIBCO 2016 dataset along with ground Fig. 5: Images from DIBCO 2018 dataset along with ground
truth images and their binarized results truth images and their binarized results

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Image FM p-FM PSNR DRD
Where MSE is the Mean Square Error and C is a constant 1 92.23 94.74 21.01 2.62
with a value equal to 1. 2 89.72 90.13 20 3.09
DRD is mainly used to measure distortions for binary 3 94.89 96.54 17.8 1.75
document images. It is mainly based on the reciprocal distance. 4 82.07 87.12 19.32 4.05
5 87.01 86.45 17.29 6.29
The pixels modified during binarization can have their distor- 6 93 96.53 18.88 3.33
tions quantified using this method. DRD can be calculated as 7 88.77 90.39 20.9 3.25
follows: 8 83.13 84.89 14.17 5.2
N
DRDk 9 92.95 93.9 19.59 3.24
DRD = k=1 (9) 10 86.66 90.47 14.12 6.41
N U BN Average 89.04 91.12 18.31 3.92
DRDk represents the distortion of the kth flipped bit which
TABLE II: Results on DIBCO 2018 dataset
is calculated using a weighted matrix of size 5x5. Its value is
given by the following formula:
j=2
i=2 
 both traditional and state-of-the-art methods on 3 metrics:
DRDk = |GTk (i, j)−Bk (x, y)|∗WN m (i, j) (10)
FM, PSNR, DRD, and only its pseudo F-measure is lower
i=−2 j=−2
than the winner’s and runner up’s algorithm. In Table 4,
NUBN is the total number of non-uniform pixels of the 8 × 8 we compare our results on DIBCO 2018 dataset with Otsu,
size window inside the ground truth image. All other methods Sauvola, Winner and Runner Up from the contest. It achieves
just quantitatively tell us how good our method is by checking an FM of 89.04, p-FM of 91.12, PSNR of 18.31, DRD of 3.92
the pixel classification but DRD tries to capture the human For this dataset as well our method outperforms all the listed
visual perception by measuring the perspective distortion of methods on 3 metrics FM, p-FM, DRD and has only a lower
the binary image. Unlike other metrics lower value of DRD PSNR value from Winner’s method. Higher FM, lower DRD
indicates a better binarization algorithm. All these metrics have for both datasets means higher precision, recall, better pixel
been calculated using the DIBCO evaluation tool. classification accuracy, and thus better binarization results.
B. Quantitative Results Method FM p-FM PSNR DRD
Lu [16] 84.44 92.04 17.33 5.12
H-DIBCO 2016 and H-DIBCO 2018 both datasets consist of Su [17] 84.75 88.94 17.64 5.64
10 handwritten document images along with their ground truth Howe [20] 87.47 92.28 18.05 5.35
image. These images cover up a wide variety of degradations. Otsu [7] 86.61 88.67 17.8 5.56
In Table 1 and 2, we present the results of our algorithm Sauvola [10] 82.52 86.85 16.42 7.49
Winner’s Method 87.61 91.28 18.11 5.21
for all the four metrics individually and averaged across all Proposed Method 90.17 90.31 18.68 3.57
10 Handwritten Document Images from H-DIBCO 2016 and Lelore [26] 87.21 88.48 17.36 5.27
H-DIBCO 2018 datasets respectively. Our method has been Runner Up 88.72 91.84 18.45 3.86
able to achieve an F-measure and pseudo-F-measure of around TABLE III: Comparison of performance of different methods
90, PSNR value is greater than 18, and a DRD value of less with our method against H-DIBCO 2016 dataset
than 4 for both of the datasets. In addition to the published
results from DIBCO, we also compare our results with several
traditional and state-of-the-art methods. Method FM p-FM PSNR DRD
Image FM p-FM PSNR DRD Otsu [7] 51.45 53.05 9.74 59.07
1 91.35 91.11 19.04 5.73 Sauvola [10] 67.81 74.08 13.78 17.69
2 89.04 89.17 23.3 3.6 Winner’s Method [21] 88.34 90.24 19.11 4.92
3 95.31 95.51 23.35 1.59 Proposed Method 89.04 91.12 18.31 3.92
4 89.76 91.28 19.38 4.13 Runner Up 73.45 75.94 14.62 26.24
5 95.9 96.58 22.45 1.4
TABLE IV: Comparison of performance of different methods
6 87.15 91.61 18.17 5.36
7 91.11 90.47 17.04 2.49 with our method against H-DIBCO 2018 dataset
8 85.86 88.75 13.99 6.1
9 89.23 84.42 15.97 2.34
10 86.99 84.18 14.1 2.95 The qualitative and quantitative results on both the datasets
Average 90.17 90.31 18.68 3.57 illustrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional
TABLE I: Results on DIBCO 2016 dataset and state-of-the-art algorithms. Fig 4(c),4(f),5(c) show that our
method deals very well with bleed through, ink spots, spill-
through. It works well even for images with faint text and
In Table 3, we compare the averaged results of our method preserves stroke connectivity evident from Fig. 5(f). Despite
from table 1 with state-of-the-art methods like Otsu, Sauvola, all these advantages like all methods, our method also has
Lu, Su, Howe, the winner and runner up from DIBCO 2016 several limitations.Firstly, it seemed to struggle on Images 8
dataset. Our method has achieved an FM of 90.17, p-FM from DIBCO 2016 dataset and Image 10 from DIBCO 2018
of 90.31, PSNR of 18.68, DRD of 3.57, and outperformed dataset which has one thing in common, the background and

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 text have very similar colors, and hence a lot of background
degradations are classified as text and result in poorly bi-
narized images. Secondly, It also suffers when images that
have black/dark colored degradation or color of degradation is
similar to the text.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented a novel method for bina-
rization of degraded historical documents. The main idea is to
form an approximation of the background using the informa-
tion from neighboring pixels in an iterative sliding window al-
gorithm. We use this estimated background to compensate for
all the background degradations, perform binarization using
Otsu, and then do effective post-processing to further clean and
create a final binary image. The performance of our algorithm
is greatly dependent on the selection of parameters. One is
required to tune four parameters: the window size for the
background estimation, the number of iterations required for
background estimation, valid size range to remove maximum
noise and keep maximum text(lower and upper limit). Bold
text usually means more iterations for accurate approximation
whereas faint text requires a larger window size to filter out
the text form background. The range for text size can be
selected according to the thickness and pixel size of the font
present inside the image. The experimental results show that
our method outperforms several traditional and state-of-the-
art algorithms. But like all other methods, this method is also
not perfect and suffers with images that have text color shade
similar to the background, and binarization performance is
affected. Our method also does not take into account the stroke
width and at some places suffers in maintaining the stroke
width connectivity. We would like to take this challenge in our
future work to further improve our method and see applications
of this background estimation technique in other fields.
R EFERENCES
[1] S. Akram, M.-U.-D. Dar, and A. Quyoum, “Document Image Processing
- A Review,” International Journal of Computer Applications, 2010.
[2] P. K. More and D. D. Dighe, “A Review on Document Image Binariza-
tion Technique for Degraded Document Images,” International Research
Journal of Engineering and Technology, 2016.
[3] S. Milyaev, O. Barinova, T. Novikova, P. Kohli, and V. Lempitsky, “Im-
age binarization for end-to-end text understanding in natural images,”
in Proceedings of the International Conference on Document Analysis
and Recognition, ICDAR, 2013.
[4] B. Sankur and M. Sezgin, “Image thresholding techniques: A survey
over categories,” Pattern Recognition, 2001.
[5] P. K. Sahoo, S. Soltani, and A. K. Wong, “A survey of thresholding
techniques,” 1988.
[6] P. Roy, S. Dutta, N. Dey, G. Dey, S. Chakraborty, and R. Ray, “Adaptive
thresholding: A comparative study,” in 2014 International Conference
on Control, Instrumentation, Communication and Computational Tech-
nologies, ICCICCT 2014, 2014.
[7] N. Otsu, “THRESHOLD SELECTION METHOD FROM GRAY-
LEVEL HISTOGRAMS.” IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern, 1979.
[8] J. Kittler and J. Illingworth, “Minimum error thresholding,” Pattern
Recognition, 1986.
[9] W. Niblack, “An introduction to digital image processing.” An introduc-
tion to digital image processing., 1986.
[10] J. Sauvola and M. Pietikäinen, “Adaptive document image binarization,”
Pattern Recognition, 2000.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka-UTEM. Downloaded on November 17,2022 at 08:49:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
[11] B. Gatos, K. Ntirogiannis, and I. Pratikakis, “ICDAR 2009 Document
Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO 2009),” in Proceedings of the In-
ternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR,
2009.
[12] I. Pratikakis, B. Gatos, and K. Ntirogiannis, “ICDAR 2011 Document
Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO 2011),” in Proceedings of the In-
ternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR,
2011.
[13] I. Pratikakis, K. Zagori, P. Kaddas, and B. Gatos, “ICFHR 2018
competition on handwritten document image binarization (H-DIBCO
2018),” in Proceedings of International Conference on Frontiers in
Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR, 2018.
[14] I. K. Kim, D. W. Jung, and R. H. Park, “Document image binarization
based on topographic analysis using a water flow model,” Pattern
Recognition, 2002.
[15] B. Gatos, I. Pratikakis, and S. J. Perantonis, “Adaptive degraded docu-
ment image binarization,” Pattern Recognition, 2006.
[16] S. Lu, B. Su, and C. L. Tan, “Document image binarization using
background estimation and stroke edges,” International Journal on
Document Analysis and Recognition, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 303–314, 2010.
[17] B. Su, S. Lu, and C. L. Tan, “Binarization of historical document
images using the local maximum and minimum,” in ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series, 2010.
[18] O. Nina, B. Morse, and W. Barrett, “A recursive otsu thresholding
method for scanned document binarization,” in 2011 IEEE Workshop
on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2011, 2011.
[19] O. I. Singh and O. James, “Local Contrast and Mean based Thresholding
Technique in Image Binarization,” International Journal of Computer
Applications, 2012.
[20] N. R. Howe, “Document binarization with automatic parameter tuning,”
International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2013.
[21] W. Xiong, X. Jia, J. Xu, Z. Xiong, M. Liu, and J. Wang, “Historical
document image binarization using background estimation and energy
minimization,” in Proceedings - International Conference on Pattern
Recognition, 2018.
[22] C. Tomasi and R. Manduchi, “Bilateral filtering for gray and color
images,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
Computer Vision, 1998.
[23] I. Pratikakis, K. Zagoris, G. Barlas, and B. Gatos, “ICFHR 2016
handwritten document image binarization contest (H-DIBCO 2016),” in
Proceedings of International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition, ICFHR, 2016.
[24] A. Horé and D. Ziou, “Image quality metrics: PSNR vs. SSIM,” in
Proceedings - International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2010.
[25] H. Lu, A. C. Kot, and Y. Q. Shi, “Distance-reciprocal distortion measure
for binary document images,” IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2004.
[26] T. Lelore and F. Bouchara, “Document image binarisation using Markov
field model,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Docu-
ment Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR, 2009.