Binarisation Algorithms Analysis on Document and Natural Scene Images

The binarisation plays an important role in a system for text extraction from images which is a prominent area in digital image processing. The primary goal of the binarisation techniques are to covert colored and gray scale image into black and white image so that overall computational overhead can be minimized. It has great impact on performance of the system for text extraction from image. Such system has number of applications like navigation system for visually impaired persons, automatic text extraction from document images, and number plate detection to enforcement traffic rules etc. The present study analysed the performance of well known binarisation algorithms on degraded documents and camera captured images. The statistical parameters namely Precession, Recall and F-measure and PSNR are used to evaluate the performance. To find the suitability of the binarisation method for text preservation in natural scene images, we have also considered visual observation DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15083

Cálculo del índice de complejidad en documentos manuscritos para la segmentación de líneas de texto

Hasta el momento el conocimiento almacenado en los manuscritos antiguos no se ha utilizado en su totalidad debido a la falta de métodos robustos en el estado del arte para el reconocimiento de texto manuscrito. La principal dificultad de los métodos para el reconocimiento de texto manuscrito es que se requiere que el texto se encuentre dividido en líneas. Además, los métodos para la Segmentación de Líneas de Texto (SLT) no han sido optimizados para procesar manuscritos antiguos. La primera etapa de la SLT es la Localización de Líneas de Texto (LLT). En la SLT se han propuesto métodos que buscan los valores máximos locales en un histograma. El problema de estos métodos es que existen demasiados máximos locales y no es posible identificar cuáles conjuntos de máximos locales representan una línea de texto. La segunda etapa de la SLT es la búsqueda de una ruta que permita separar las líneas de texto vecinas. Por un lado, el problema de los métodos actuales es que en algunos casos se realiza una búsqueda local de la ruta. Por otro lado, los métodos que realizan una búsqueda global de la ruta tienen problemas para encontrar una ruta entre trazos que se sobreponen. Los problemas de las dos etapas conforman un valor de complejidad. La complejidad visual de un documento mansucrito antiguo para ser segmentado puede apreciarse por el humano experto, sin embargo, no existe en el estado del arte un método para calcular la complejidad. En el estado del arte existen técnicas que permiten realizar una separación del cuerpo de letras y el espacio interlineal. Este trabajo se enfoca cuantificar la cantidad de información en el espacio interlineal para establecer un índice de complejidad. El índice de complejidad propuesto calcula la cantidad de información que aportan los trazos horizontales y verticales; además de la cantidad de información que aporta la tinta del documento y los valores del color del material de escritura

An intelligent framework for pre-processing ancient Thai manuscripts on palm leaves

In Thailand’s early history, prior to the availability of paper and printing technologies, palm leaves were used to record information written by hand. These ancient documents contain invaluable knowledge. By digitising the manuscripts, the content can be preserved and made widely available to the interested community via electronic media. However, the content is difficult to access or retrieve. In order to extract relevant information from the document images efficiently, each step of the process requires reduction of irrelevant data such as noise or interference on the images. The pre-processing techniques serve the purpose of extracting regions of interest, reducing noise from the image and degrading the irrelevant background. The image can then be directly and efficiently processed for feature selection and extraction prior to the subsequent phase of character recognition. It is therefore the main objective of this study to develop an efficient and intelligent image preprocessing system that could be used to extract components from ancient manuscripts for information extraction and retrieval purposes. The main contributions of this thesis are the provision and enhancement of the region of interest by using an intelligent approach for the pre-processing of ancient Thai manuscripts on palm leaves and a detailed examination of the preprocessing techniques for palm leaf manuscripts. As noise reduction and binarisation are involved in the first step of pre-processing to eliminate noise and background from image documents, it is necessary for this step to provide a good quality output; otherwise, the accuracy of the subsequent stages will be affected. In this work, an intelligent approach to eliminate background was proposed and carried out by a selection of appropriate binarisation techniques using SVM. As there could be multiple binarisation techniques of choice, another approach was proposed to eliminate the background in this study in order to generate an optimal binarised image. The proposal is an ensemble architecture based on the majority vote scheme utilising local neighbouring information around a pixel of interest. To extract text from that binarised image, line segmentation was then applied based on the partial projection method as this method provides good results with slant texts and connected components. To improve the quality of the partial projection method, an Adaptive Partial Projection (APP) method was proposed. This technique adjusts the size of a character strip automatically by adapting the width of the strip to separate the connected component of consecutive lines through divide and conquer, and analysing the upper vowels and lower vowels of the text line. Finally, character segmentation was proposed using a hierarchical segmentation technique based on a contour-tracing algorithm. Touching components identified from the previous step were then separated by a trace of the background skeletons, and a combined method of segmentation. The key datasets used in this study are images provided by the Project for Palm Leaf Preservation, Northeastern Thailand Division, and benchmark datasets from the Document Image Binarisation Contest (DIBCO) series are used to compare the results of this work against other binarisation techniques. The experimental results have shown that the proposed methods in this study provide superior performance and will be used to support subsequent processing of the Thai ancient palm leaf documents. It is expected that the contributions from this study will also benefit research work on ancient manuscripts in other languages