Document Image Binarization Using a Water Flow Model
In-Gwon Kim, Dong-Uk Jeong, Jeong-Hui Song, Rae‐Hong Park · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2001
This paper proposes a local adaptive thresholding method based on a water flow model, in which an image surface is considered as a 3-dimensional (3-D) terrain. To extract characters from backgrounds, we pour water onto the terrain surface. Water flows down to the lower regions of the terrain and fills valleys. Then, the amount of filled water is thresholded, in which the proposed thresholding method is applied to gray level document images consisting of characters and backgrounds. The proposed method based on a water flow model shows the property of locally adaptive thresholding. Computer simulation with synthetic and real document images shows that the proposed method yields effective adaptive thresholding results for binarization of document images.