Restoration based Contourlet Transform for historical document image binarization

We propose in this paper, the use of the Contourlet Transform for evaluating the quality of the degraded historical document. To facilitate the binarization, we first improve the quality of the document image by applying the Contourlet Transform, in order to select significant coefficients. After reconstruction, a local thresholding method is used for extracting the foreground text. The proposed method is evaluated on the benchmarking dataset used in the international document image binarization contest (DIBCO 2009/2011 and H-DIBCO 2010/2012) according to the type of degradation. Promising results are obtained comparatively to the standard methods.