A novel hybrid algorithm for binarization of badly illuminated document images

In this paper, we present a novel hybrid algorithm for binarization of badly illuminated document images. This algorithm locally enhances the document image and makes the gray levels of text and background pixels separable. Afterward a simple global binarization algorithm binarizes the enhanced image. The enhancement process is a novel method that uses a separate transformation function to map the gray level of each pixel into a new domain. For each pixel, the transformation function is determined using its neighboring pixels gray level. The proposed binarization algorithm is robust for wide variety of degraded document images. Evaluation over a set of degraded document images illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed binarization algorithm.