Adaptive binarization of 17th century printed text
Carl Carenwall · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2012
This work focused on implementing and evaluating an adaptive water flow model for binarization of historical documents, as presented by Valizadeh and Ehsanollah in an article published in early 2012. While the original method sought an optimal result for all kinds of degraded documents, both on hand written and printed, the work presented here only needed to be concerned with printed documents. This was due to being focused on specific documents scanned by the Uppsala university library. The method itself consists of several steps, including a couple that uses other methods for binarization to achieve a good result. While the implementation appears to have been largely successful in replicating the results of the original method, it is very possible that some minor tweaking could result in further improvements. To replicate the results, however, a new parameter had to be inserted in the method. Regardless if this was because of some mistake, or if the sample data used by Valizadeh and Ehsanollah simply differs from the one used here, this may be worth looking more at. In the end of this report are comparisons with a couple of common and state-of-the-art methods for binarization, and this method appear to perform favourably in most cases.