A Review of Evaluation of Optimal Binarization Technique for Character Segmentation in Historical Manuscripts

A number of binarization techniques have been proposed in the past for automatic document processing. Although some studies have aimed to evaluate the performance of binarization algorithms, there is no automatic system that is capable of selecting the most appropriate method of binarization. While preprocessing techniques can be applied, binarization is essential to extract the objects in the first place before the characters can be separated for recognition. Although there are several commonly used binarization approaches, there is no single algorithm that is suitable for all images. Hence, there is a need to determine the optimal binarization algorithm for each image. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of the existing methods of binarization and evaluation measurement which have been developed recently. This will lead to the proposal and development of an approach for automatic selection of binarization techniques in handling historical document images.