A Binarization Method for Degraded Document Images with Morphological Operations

In this paper, we propose an effective binarization method for de-graded document images in this paper. This method employs morphological operations throughout its algorithm to suppress uneven illumination in the background region, to detect the character location and to reconstruct text regions. Moreover, a technique for estimating stroke width of characters is introduced to remove noises in a robust manner and preserve text regions. In order to confirm its validity, several of the experiments are conducted on the datasets including a wide variety of degraded document images which are provided by DIBCO 2011 (Document Image Binarization Contest). It is shown that our method achieves a good performance, compared with other methods submitted in the contest.