Sliding window approach based Text Binarisation from Complex Textual images

Text binarisation process classifies individual pixels as text or background in the textual images. Binarization is necessary to bridge the gap between localization and recognition by OCR. This paper presents Sliding window method to binarise text from textual images with textured background. Suitable preprocessing techniques are applied first to increase the contrast of the image and blur the background noises due to textured background. Then Edges are detected by iterative thresholding. Subsequently formed edge boxes are analyzed to remove unwanted edges due to complex background and binarised by sliding window approach based character size uniformity check algorithm. The proposed method has been applied on localized region from heterogeneous textual images and compared with Otsu, Niblack methods and shown encouraging performance of the proposed method. KeywordsBinarization; Character segmentation; textured background; Iterative thresholding; Edge spread analysis.