Binarizing Business Card Images for Mobile Devices

Business card images are of multiple natures as these often contain graphics, pictures and texts of various fonts and sizes both in background and foreground. So, the conventional binarization techniques designed for document images can not be directly applied on mobile devices. In this paper, we have presented a fast binarization technique for camera captured business card images. A card image is split into small blocks. Some of these blocks are classified as part of the background based on intensity variance. Then the non-text regions are eliminated and the text ones are skew corrected and binarized using a simple yet adaptive technique. Experiment shows that the technique is fast, efficient and applicable for the mobile devices. Keywords— Binarization, Business Card Reader, Text Extraction, Skew Correction