Title: Document image binarisation: an overview and a practical comparison study

Authors: Mawloud Mosbah

Addresses: Informatics Department, Faculty of Sciences, University 20 Août 1955 of Skikda, Skikda, Algeria; LRES Laboratory, University 20 Août 1955 of Skikda, Skikda, Algeria

Abstract: In this paper, we deal with document image binarisation, as an essential image pre-processing step, through presenting a comparison study of the different methods of the literature in terms of effectiveness. In addition, this sub-field of document image binarisation, including a lot of methods, techniques, and algorithms, proposed along the recent decades of years, is overviewed here through categorising the various methods into their different approaches as well as talking about the evaluation step via showing the metrics and the considered public datasets and benchmarks. Some issues caused by different types of noise, some frequent utilised filters, considered as pre-processing, as well as some other techniques of post-processing are also presented. To note that the results compared here are as given in the different references that are either regular papers or comparative studies in the form of competitions.

Keywords: document image; document image binarisation; image binarisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAPR.2024.146816

International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, 2024 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.222 - 262

Received: 16 Aug 2024
Accepted: 27 Apr 2025
Published online: 19 Jun 2025 *