Document Image Binarization Based on NFCM

Document image binarization plays an important role in image segmentation and its effect directly impacts on the quality of the OCR recognition system. However, binarization is difficult for camera-based document images with poor contrast or illumination. In this paper, we propose a binarization algorithm, called NFCM, for camera-based document image. NFCM, a local threshold method, is a combination of Niblack algorithm and FCM (Fuzzy C-Means) algorithm. It is good at not only preserving the character stokes, but also alleviating the ghost artifacts. Comparative experiments show that NFCM can obtain favorable results with respect to the OCR performance.