A New Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Binarizing Ancient Document

Abstract

Binarization is one of the most critical steps in document image analysis, especially in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. Binarization process results in two image representations: black pixel represents the text or object, and white pixel represents the background. Thresholding is the simplest binarization approach. In this paper, we proposed a new adaptive thresholding technique for binarizing ancient document. The proposed method is the combination of Niblack and Sauvola techniques. It solved Niblack and Sauvola drawbacks by determining the mean of the thresholding values of both methods. The binarization results were evaluated using FM, FMps, PSNR, NRM, DRD, and MPM. The results showed that the proposed method had remarkable performance in binarizing ancient document, especially ancient Jawi document.