An Objective Evaluation Methodology for Document Image Binarization Techniques

Evaluation of document image binarization techniques is a tedious task that is mainly performedby a human expert or by involving an OCR engine. This paper presents an objective evaluation methodology for document image binarization techniques that aims to reduce the human involvement in the ground truth construction and consecutive testing. A skeletonized ground truth image is produced by the user following a semi-automatic procedure. The estimated ground truth image can aid in evaluating the binarization result in terms of recall and precision as well as to further analyze the result by calculating broken and missing text, deformations and false alarms. A detailed description of the methodology along with a benchmarking of the six (6) most promising state-of-the-art binarization algorithms based on the proposed methodology is presented.