Study and Simulation of Different Techniques of

Adaptive Restoration of Degraded Document Images

Keywords: Binarization, Filtering, Thresholding, Adaptive

Abstract
In the last few decades, computer originated electronic documents becomes the exclusive
medium of transmitting information. To compensate with it, old text document images must be
stored in a computer readable format. Document Image Processing deals with the restoration of
document images. Document images are processed in two distinct phases to extract their
contents: Binarization of the document images which refers to the conversion of a gray scale
image into a binary image thereby distinguishing the text areas from the background areas and
the another one is character segmentation and recognition which deals with the recognition of the
characters of the binary document image. Binarization plays an essential role in the whole
process as the performance of the character recognition critically depends on the accuracy of the
binary image. However, binarization is not an easy task because of the degradations that appear
frequently in the document image due to various reasons. Hence some special techniques are
required to process such text document images. In this minor project, we have studied and
simulated four different binarization techniques: Niblack [5], Sauvola [2], Gatos et al. [1] and
Halabi et al. [4]. Niblacks method is good for text regions only, Sauvolas method take cares of
both text and background regions, Gatoes et als method performs well in presence of
degradation in background surface and Halabi et al.s method also performs well by applying
Gaussian function in pre-processing step. The simulation was done in MATLAB. We analyze the
binarization results for each method in OCR software.

Introduction
Binarization of document images are broadly classified into two categories: global and adaptive.
The global methods use only one threshold to separate the text region from the background
region, which gives good result in case of uniform background. Adaptive method uses different
threshold value depending upon the local pixel information and it gives better result in compared
to global methods when degradation is present in the document image. In this study, we consider
adaptive binarization of text document images only.



Different Binarization methods
[A] Niblacks method
Threshold is calculated based on the local mean and standard deviation of the pixel information
within the sliding window by the following formula:

[B] Sauvolas method
Sauvolas method is the modified version of Niblacks approach. Threshold is calculated
considering the dynamics of standard deviation by the following formula:

[3] Gatos et al.s method
It uses five distinct steps: preprocessing, rough estimation of foreground region, approximate
background calculation, final thresholding and post-processing. Usually adaptive wiener filter is
used for preprocessing of the main grayscale document images. A rough estimation of the text
region is calculated using sauvolas method which gives the superset of correct text regions. An
approximate background is calculated from the filtered grayscale image using interpolation of
the pixel corresponding to the text region of the estimated foreground. Final thresholding is
performed by calculating the distance of foreground text pixel from it background adaptively.
Finally, a post-processing is performed using shrink and swell filtering.








Fig1. : Block diagram of poor quality document image binarization










Weiner
Filter
Sauvola's
adaptive
thresholding

Interpolation

Examine pixel contrast
B(x,y)-I(x,y)>d(B(x,y))

Post-
Processing

I
s
(x,y)
Gray-scale
source image
I(x,y)
Gray-scale
image after pre-
processing
S(x,y)
Intermediate B/W
image
B(x,y)
Gray-scale
Background
surface image
T(x,y)
Final image
T(x,y)
Final image
after post
processing
[4] Halabi et al.s method
It uses the same steps as the previous method, but a Gaussian filter is used in preprocessing step
to reduce the noise of the grayscale image.








Fig. 3: Block diagram of Halabi et al.s method

Experimental Results and Conclusion
Niblacks method performs binarization well in the regions near to the text areas. But large
amount of noise is present in the non-text regions. This problem of Niblack is overcome by
sauvolas method by considering the dynamics of standard deviation of the pixels for the
grayscale images. However, it gives poor performance when the degree of degradation becomes
more severe. The method proposed by Gatos et al. can deal with the degradations in the
background surface by considering the distance of the text and background surface as threshold.
Halabi et al.s method also perform well, but blurring of edges occur due to the usage of
Gaussian filter.

References
1. Gatos B., I. Pratikakis, S. J. Perantonis, Adaptive Degraded Image Binarization,
Journal of Pattern Recocnition, 39 (2006)
2. Sauvola J., M. Pietikainen, Adaptive Document Image Binarization, Pattern
Recognition 33 (2000)
3. Basilios Gatos, Ioannis Pratikakis and Stavros J. Perantonis An Adaptive Binarization
Technique for Low Quality Historical Documents (2004)
4. Yahia S. Halabi, Zaid SA, Faris Hamdan, Khaled Haj Yousef Modeling Adaptive
Degraded Document Image Binarization and Optical Character System (2009)
5. W. Niblack, An Introduction to Digital Image Processing, Prentice-Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, 1986
6. ABBYY (www.finereader.com).
I
s
(x,y)
Gray-scale
source image
I(x,y)
Gray-scale
image after pre-
processing
S(x,y)
Intermediate B/W
image
B(x,y)
Gray-scale
Background
surface image
T(x,y)
Final image
T(x,y)
Final image
after post
processing
Gaussian
Filter
Sauvola's
adaptive
thresholding

Interpolation

Examine pixel contrast
B(x,y)-I(x,y)>d(B(x,y))

Post-
Processing