Conversion of color documents to grayscale

In this paper, a novel method to convert color documents to grayscale is proposed. This approach takes as criteria that a suitable form of a grayscale document must have locally uniform background, well separated characters from the background and reduced noise. The main stages of the proposed technique are color reduction to a limited number of dominant colors and transformation of the gray classes obtained 3-D to a more compact form. The resultant grayscale document gives better OCR results and better compression ratio.