Generation of optimal binarisation output from ancient Thai manuscripts on palm leaves

Recently, several binarisation techniques have been proposed to process different kinds of ancient document images. While many well-known binarisation techniques are particularly suitable for certain types of document images, there is no specific guidelines on the determination of the appropriate type of image degradation, or characteristics of the image. In this paper, a novel method has been proposed to generate the optimal binary image from different binarised outputs from a document image. This approach is based on weight majority vote, and uncertain pixels are then determined based on local areas of the binarised images, by applying iteration of weight majority vote. Experiment over benchmark data set of the Document Image Binarization Contest (DIBCO) 2011 shows that the proposed method provided better performance than most well-known techniques. The proposed method has also been applied to ancient manuscripts on palm leaves from Thailand and this approach provided better results than binarised outputs from original binarisation techniques.