Automatic Document Image Binarization using Bayesian Optimization
This addresses the challenge of segmenting text from degraded document images, which is incremental as it builds on existing binarization techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of document image binarization by proposing an algorithm that uses two band-pass filtering for noise removal and Bayesian optimization for automatic hyperparameter selection, achieving results demonstrated on DIBCO and H-DIBCO datasets.
Document image binarization is often a challenging task due to various forms of degradation. Although there exist several binarization techniques in literature, the binarized image is typically sensitive to control parameter settings of the employed technique. This paper presents an automatic document image binarization algorithm to segment the text from heavily degraded document images. The proposed technique uses a two band-pass filtering approach for background noise removal, and Bayesian optimization for automatic hyperparameter selection for optimal results. The effectiveness of the proposed binarization technique is empirically demonstrated on the Document Image Binarization Competition (DIBCO) and the Handwritten Document Image Binarization Competition (H-DIBCO) datasets.