A Methodology for Document Image Dewarping Techniques Performance Evaluation

One of the major challenges in camera document analysis is to deal with the page curl and perspective distortions. In spite of the prevalence of dewarping techniques, no standard for their performance evaluation method exists with most of the evaluation done to concentrate in visual pleasing impressions. This paper presents an objective evaluation methodology for document image dewarping techniques. First, manually selected sets of points of the initial warped image are matched with the corresponding points of the dewarping result using the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). Each set corresponds to a representative text line of the image. Then, based on cubic polynomial curves that fit to the selected text lines, a comprehensive measure which reflects the entire performance of a dewarping technique in a concise quantitative manner is calculated. Experiments applying the proposed performance evaluation methodology on two state of the art dewarping techniques as well as a commercial package are presented.