An Evaluation Technique for Binarization Algorithms

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. The choice of the most appropriate binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very difficult procedure itself. In this paper, we propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesn’t require anything more than the binarization stage. As a demonstration of the proposed technique, we use the case of degraded historical documents. Then we apply the proposed technique to 30 binarization algorithms. Experimental results and conclusions are presented.