Effective and fast binarization method for combined degradation on ancient documents

Document image binarization is a challenging task because of combined degradation in a document. In this study, a new binarization method is proposed for binarizing an ancient document with combined degradation. The proposed method comprises the following four stages: histogram analysis, contrast enhancement, local adaptive thresholding, and artifact removal. In histogram analysis, a new approach is applied to establish a uniform background. Next, the image contrast is enhanced using a new contrast enhancement, and then the document is binarized using a novel local adaptive thresholding. Artifacts from the binarization process are removed in the artifact removal stage. Finally, an experiment is conducted using one private and four public datasets and by simulating the proposed method with and without contrast enhancement. The results showed that the proposed method is faster and more effective compared to other state-of-the-art procedures for binarizing ancient documents.