An adaptive logical method for binarization of degraded document images

This paper describes a modified logical thresholding method for binarization of seriously degraded and very poor quality gray-scale document images. This method can deal with complex signal-dependent noise, variable background intensity caused by nonuniform illumination, shadow, smear or smudge and very low contrast. The output image has no obvious loss of useful information. Firstly, we analyse the clustering and connection characteristics of the character stroke from the run-length histogram for selected image regions and various inhomogeneous gray-scale backgrounds. Then, we propose a modified logical thresholding method to extract the binary image adaptively from the degraded gray-scale document image with complex and inhomogeneous background. It can adjust the size of the local area and logical thresholding level adaptively according to the local run-length histogram and the local gray-scale inhomogeneity. Our method can threshold various poor quality gray-scale document images automatically without need of any prior knowledge of the document image and manual fine-tuning of parameters. It keeps useful information more accurately without overconnected and broken strokes of the characters, and thus, has a wider range of applications compared with other methods. © 2000 Pattern Recognition Society.