An evaluation survey of binarization algorithms on historical documents

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. There are many difficulties associated with satisfactory binarization of document images and especially in cases of degraded historical documents. In this paper, we try to answer the question ldquohow well an existing binarization algorithm can binarize a degraded document image?rdquo We propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesnpsilat require anything more than the binarization stage. Then we apply the proposed technique to 30 existing binarization algorithms. Experimental results and conclusions are presented.