An initial study on the construction of ground truth binarized images of ancient palm leaf manuscripts

Ancient palm leaf manuscripts are one of the very valuable cultural heritages that store various forms of knowledge and historical records of social life in Southeast Asia. The automatic analysis of these documents, in order to extract relevant information, is a real challenge. However, to evaluate the developed extraction algorithms, a ground truth is absolutely necessary. In this paper, we present some of the challenges of the state of the art binarization methods as an initial study for the construction of ground truth binarized images of palm leaf manuscripts. We propose and analyze the need for a specific scheme for the construction of the ground truth of binarized images. The aim of this scheme is to achieve a better ground truth for low quality palm leaf manuscripts. We experimentally tested and evaluated our proposed specific scheme and got promising results. This scheme adapts and performs better in constructing the ground truth of binarized images for palm leaf manuscripts.