Bio-Inspired Modeling for the Enhancement of Historical Handwritten Documents
Konstantinos Zagoris, Ioannis Pratikakis · 2017
An important step for the document analysis and recognition pipeline is the document image binarization procedure. In the case of historical handwritten document images, the inherent degradation of the documents requires a preprocessing step aiming to enhance the image and improve the subsequent binarization step. To address this challenge a new document image enhancement method is proposed based on Bio-Inspired Models and especially on the OFF-center ganglion cells of the Human Vision System. Experimental results demonstrate the improvement of standard binarization methods when the proposed enhancement method is used.