Skew correction of business card images acquired in PDA

An efficient algorithm for rotational skew correction of business card images acquired in a PDA (personal digital assistant) camera is presented. The proposed method is composed of four parts: block adaptive binarisation (BAB), stripe generation, skew angle calculation and image rotation. In BAB, an input image is binarised block by block so as to lessen the effects of irregular illumination and shadow over the input image. In stripe generation, character string clusters are generated merging adjacent characters and their strings, and then only clusters useful for skew angle calculation are output as stripes. In skew angle calculation, the direction angles of the stripes are calculated using their central moments and then the skew angle of the input image is determined averaging the direction angles. In image rotation, the input image is rotated by the skew angle. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields root mean square error of 0.44° for test images of several types of business cards acquired by a PDA under various surrounding conditions.