Hybrid binarization technique for degraded document images

Document Image binarization is a process of converting the document image into binary image containing text as foreground and plain white as background or vice versa. Characters from the document image should be extracted from the binarized image, in order to recognize them. So performance of the character recognition system is completely depends on the binarization quality. This paper presents a simple and efficient binarization method to binarize the degraded document image. The proposed technique is efficient to tolerate the high inter and intra intensity variation in the degraded document image. The proposed method is based on spatial domain techniques: Laplacian operator, Adaptive Bilateral filter and Gaussian filter and works well for degraded documents and palm leaf manuscript images.