A new hybrid binarization method based on Kmeans

The document binarization is a fundamental processing step toward Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It aims to separate the foreground text from the document background. In this article, we propose a novel binarization technique combining local and global approaches using the clustering algorithm Kmeans. The proposed Hybrid Binarization, based on Kmeans (HBK), performs a robust binarization on scanned documents. According to several experiments, we demonstrate that the HBK method improves the binarization quality while minimizing the amount of distortion. Moreover, it outperforms several well-known state of the art methods in the OCR evaluation.