Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280

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Neurocomputing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom

Broken and degraded document images binarization MARK

a,b a,⁎
Yiping Chen , Liansheng Wang
a
Department of Computer Science, School of Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
b
School of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A BS T RAC T

Communicated by X. Li Document image binarization refers to the conversion of a document image into a binary image. For broken and
Keywords: severely degraded document images, binarization is a very challenging process. Unlike the traditional methods
Binarization that separate the foreground from the background, this paper presents a new framework for the binarization of
Thresholding broken and degraded document images and restoring the quality of the document images. In our approach, the
Document image non-local means method is extended and used to remove noises from the input document image in the step of
pre-process. Then the proposed method binarizes the document image which takes advantage of the quick
adaptive thresholding proposed by Pierre D. Wellner. To get more pleasing binarization results, the binarized
document image is post-processed finally. There are three measures in the post-process step: de-speckle,
preserve stroke connectivity and improve quality of text regions. Experimental results show significant
improvement in the binarization of the broken and degraded document images collected from various sources
including degraded and broken books, magazines and document files.

1. Introduction
Historical and ancient document collections available in libraries
throughout the world are of great cultural and scientific importance.
The transformation of such documents into digital form is essential for
maintaining the quality of the originals while provide scholars with full
access to that information [1]. However, the document images may be
broken and degraded because of the poor quality of paper, the printing
process, ink blot and fading, document aging, extraneous marks, noise
from scanning, etc. [2]. Restoring and enhancing the quality of the
broken and degraded document image is a common and essential
requirement in libraries.
Comparison with the traditional methods, e.g. median filtering [3],
wiener filtering [4] and Bayesian filter [5], document image binariza-
tion plays a key role in document processing since its performance
affects quite critically the degree of success in a subsequent character
segmentation and recognition [6]. The commonly used approaches of
binarization can be classified into two types: global methods and local
adaptive methods. The global document image binarization methods
find a global threshold for the whole document image, which can deal
with background noise well but usually over-thresholds document
images results in broken character strokers. Unlike global approaches,
the local adaptive document image binarization [7,1] determine the
threshold for each pixel adaptively, which can behave better than global
methods on degraded and broken document images. Adaptive binar-
ization can also reduce noise while segmenting text from background.
Recent efforts in the adaptive method have been done in [8,9].
Specifically designed for broken document images (see Fig. 1),
Stubberud et al. [10] trained an adaptive restoration filter and applied
the filter to the distorted text image that the OCR system could not
recognize. Adrian et al. [11] proposed the linking broken character
borders with variable sized masks to improve recognition accuracy.
Banerjee et al. [2] proposed the contextual restoration which learns the
text model from the degraded document itself. Touching and broken
characters were corrected by the algorithm. Lazzara et al. [12] recently
improved Sauvola's method using a multiscale scheme. Milyaev et al.
[13] proposed a binarization method for accurate scene text under-
standing. Recently, Ntirogiannis et al. [14] proposed a pixel-based
binarization evaluation methodology for historical handwritten/ma-
chine-printed document images.
But it can not prevent missing punctuation marks. In addition to
broken document images, various methods for degraded document
images have been proposed. Bal [15] proposed a language-independent
semi-automated system for enhancing degraded document images that
is capable of exploiting inter- and intra-document coherence.
Likforman-Sulem et al. [16] compared two image restoration ap-
proaches for the pre-processing of printed documents. She believed
high-pass filtering may remove stains and holes. Lelore et al. [17]
introduced a technique based on a Markov Random Field (MRF) model
of the handwritten document, whose observation model was estimated
thanks to an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. The method
showed a greater sensitivity to thin line than other techniques. In the

⁎
Corresponding author at: Department of Computer Science, School of Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2016.12.058
Received 17 February 2015; Received in revised form 2 September 2016; Accepted 26 December 2016
Available online 06 January 2017
0925-2312/ © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Y. Chen, L. Wang
Fig. 1. A broken document image (a) and the result (c) of our proposed binarization. (b)
is the direct OCR result of (a), and (d) is the corresponding OCR result of (c).
recent efforts, Biswas et al. [18] proposed a global-to-local approach for
this issue and Singh et al. [19] proposed a method for severely
degraded and non-uniformly illuminated documents.
To cut these shortcomings mentioned before, we propose a frame-
work that contains three steps. The document images are pre-pro-
cessed using the non-local means denoising method in the first step.
Secondly, we extend the Wellner's quick adaptive thresholding method
based on histogram and use Rosenfeld's method to determine the
threshold for each pixel. In order to get pleasing binarization results,
three measures are employed to post-process the output thresholding
document images in the final step including de-speckle, preserve
strokes and improve quality of the text regions. Experiments and
evaluations are performed to test our proposed method.
The structure of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
describes the quick adaptive thresholding. Section 3 presents the
framework of our proposed method in detail. The experimental results
and discussions are described in Section 4. Section 5 contains conclu-
sions and our future work.
2. Quick adaptive thresholding
Our proposed algorithm is an extension of Wellner's adaptive
thresholding method [20]. The main idea of Wellner's algorithm is
that each pixel is compared to the average of its neighborhood pixels.
Specially, the method is to run through the image while calculating a
moving average of the last s pixels (see Fig. 2). When the value of a
pixel is significantly t percent lower than this average, it is set to black,
otherwise it is left white.
The Wellner's method first treat the image as a single row of pixel
composed of all the rows in the image lined up next to each other, see
Fig. 2. The sum fs(n) and average of the values of the last s pixels are
computed using the Eq. (1) and (2) respectively. The value of the
resulting image T(n) is either 1 (for black) or 0 (for white) depending
on whether it is t percent darker than the average value of the previous
s pixels according to Eq. (2).
s −1
fs (n ) = ∑ pn −i
i =0
⎧ ⎛ ⎞ filtering parameter which usually depends on the standard deviation of
⎪1 if p < ⎜ fs (n ) ⎟ ( 100 − t )
T (n ) = ⎨ n
⎝ s ⎠ 100
⎪ constant.
⎩ 0 otherwise
In order to save the computational cost and get more pleasing results,
Wellner gave a quick adaptive thresholding method, instead of traver-
sing the image from left to right or right to left, the improved method
traverses it alternatively from the left and from the right as illustrated
in Fig. 3.
n neighborhood of the pixel pi. Here, we use the average gradient
gs (n ) = ∑ (1 − 1/s)i pn −i
i =0
Fig. 2. Treat the image as a single row of pixel composed of all the rows in the image
lined up next to each other.
Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280
Fig. 3. Traverses image alternatively from the left and from the right.
g (n ) + g (n − width )
h (n ) =
2 (4)
width is the width of the image. g(n) (in Eq. (3)) and h(n) (in Eq. (4))
are the further approximations of the sum f(n), respectively. h(n)
makes the algorithm get rid of the every-other-line effect and produces
consistently good results across a wide range of images. The method
works well because comparing a pixel to the average of neighborhood
pixels will preserve hard contrast lines and ignore soft gradient
changes. The advantage of the method is that it just need one pass
through the image. However, there are several problems with Wellner's
method. First, the method is very sensitive to the scanning order.
Second, the moving average is not a good representation for the
neighborhood pixels since the similar pixels are not evenly distributed
in all directions.
3. Our proposed method
The proposed method for broken and degraded document images
binarization is illustrated in Fig. 4. All steps of the method are
described in following subsections.
3.1. Noise removal using non-local means
Broken and degraded document images contain many noises, so
noise removal is needed before we apply thresholding to the input
document images. In this pre-processing step, non-local means denois-
ing method [21] is used to smooth the document images. Non-local
means method assumes the image contains an extensive amount of
self-similarity. It is a neighborhood filter but its neighborhood is the
whole image. Non-local means method has been proved working well
and robust for image noise removal.
Given a discrete noisy image v = {v (i )|i ∈ I}, the noise removal
value NL [v](i ) is defined as following equation:
NL [v](i ) = ∑ w (i , j ) v ( j )
j∈I (5)
the weight w (i , j ) is defined as
1 ⎛ ∥ v (Ni ) − v (Nj )∥2 ⎞
2, a ⎟
w (i , j ) = exp ⎜⎜ − ⎟
Z (i ) ⎝ h2 ⎠ (6)
(1)
where a > 0 is the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel, h is a
the noise, ∥∥ is the weighted Euclidean distance, Z(i) is the normalizing
(2)
However, the non-local means algorithm is slow to compute since it
searches and computes the weight around the whole image for each
pixel. We proposed a multi-scale method to evenly divide the whole
image into given size (S) portions, then choose one portion to compute
the weight and denoise the pixel pi. The scale S is S = 2n (n = 6, 5, …, 1).
The chosen portion is the most similar one compared with the
orientation as a criteria of similarity distance. The improved non-local
(3) means method reduces lots of computational cost and works well, see
Fig. 5.
3.2. Adaptive thresholding with histogram
A final adaptive threshold will be determined in this step. Our
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Y. Chen, L. Wang Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280

Fig. 4. The flowchart of our proposed method.

Fig. 8. Result of Document image post-processing: (a)binarized document image; (b)

Fig. 5. Document image pre-processing: (a)input document image; (b)de-noised image
post-processed image.
using non-local means method.

Fig. 6. Document image after thresholding: (a)de-noised document image; (b)result

after our proposed thresholding method.

proposed method is a variant of Wellner's adaptive thresholding but

based on histogram. The proposed method traverses the image
alternatively from the left and from the right. The text regions are
located if the value of the pre-processed image I ′(x , y) exceeds a
threshold d. The threshold d is determined using Rosenfeld's method
[22] which is based on analyzing the concavities of the histogram h (I ′)
vis-a-vis its convex hull, Hull (I ′), that is the set theoretic difference
|Hull (I ′) − p (I ′)|. p (I ′) is the probability mass function of the image I′.
When the convex hull of the histogram is calculated, the deepest
concavity points become candidates for a threshold. When the back-
ground is gradiently similar to the text regions, we use the following
logistic sigmoid function that exhibits the desired saturation behavior
for large and small values of the background:
⎛ ⎞
⎜ ⎟
⎜ (1 − p2 ) ⎟ reduction [23] proposed by Liu et al. is used. The speckle reduction
d (I ′(x , y)) = qδ ⎜ + p2 ⎟
⎛ ⎞
⎜ 1 + exp ⎜ −4I ′(x , y) + 2(1 + p1) ⎟ ⎟
⎜ ⎟
⎝ ⎝ b (1 − p1) 1 − p1 ⎠ ⎠ (7)
where q is a weighting parameter, δ is the average difference between
the black and white pixels, p1 and p2 are constant. We suggest the
following parameter values: q = 0.6, p1 = 0.5, p2 = 0.8 in the experi-
ments. The results after our proposed adaptive thresholding method
are demonstrated in Fig. 6.
3.3. Post-processing
After the proposed adaptive thresholding, the output images still
Fig. 9. Precision of our method over 150 document images with different q, p1, and p2 .
have some outliers, especially the speckles, see Fig. 6(b). The quality of
text regions in the output images is also poor and stroke connectivity is
not preserved. We apply following three measures to remove the
speckles, preserve the stroke connectivity and improve the quality of
text regions. The detailed post-processing will be described as below.
3.3.1. De-speckle
In this step, adaptive window anisotropic diffusion for speckle
anisotropic diffusion can be modeled as follows:
∂It (x, y, t )
= div [c (q )·∇It (x, y, t )]
∂t (8)
∂It (x, y, t )
It (x, y, t )|t =0 = It (x, y, 0), |∂Ω = 0
∂n (9)
where It is the document image after our thresholding, ∂Ω the
boundary of Ω, n the unit vector perpendicular to boundary, ∇the
gradient operator, div the divergence operator, It (x, y, 0) the initial
noisy image, It (x, y, t ) the image at time t and c(q) the diffusion
coefficient, which is an “edge-stopping” and non-negative, monotoni-
cally decreasing function. The diffusion coefficient is given by

Fig. 7. Procedure of preserving stroke connectivity.

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Y. Chen, L. Wang Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280

Table 1
Test document image portion and its corresponding OCR results. Underlined words indicate the error OCR results.

Table 2 Table 3
PSNR results of corresponding document images binarization in Table 1. Quantitative evaluation of the binarization results of different methods over 150
documents extracted from a digital issue of a French magazine.
Method PSNR
Method Precision Recall Fm Time (s)
Niblack [28] 12.7642
Sauvola et al. [29] 12.3087 W. Nibleck's 0.70 0.75 73.2 165
Kim et al. [30] 14.9765
Gatos et al. [6] 16.6665 Sauvola et al. 0.89 90.4 91 180
Chou et al. method [27] 16.9498 Kim et al. 0.88 0.88 87.1 190
Wagdy et al. method [31] 17.2156 Gatos et al. 0.90 0.91 90.5 202
Our proposed 18.2381 Chou et al. 0.92 0.91 92.8 190
Wagdy et al. 0.93 0.92 93.3 175
Ours 0.97 0.95 95.7 156

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Fig. 10. Binarization of a severely broken document image: (a) original document image; (b) Nibleck's method [28]; (c) Sauvola et al. method [29]; (d) Kim et al. method [30]; (e) Gatos
et al. method [6]; (f) Chou et al. method [27]; (g) Wagdy et al. method [31]; (h) our proposed method.

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Fig. 11. Binarization of an historical handwritten document image: (a) original
document image; (b) Nibleck's method [28]; (c) Sauvola et al. method [29]; (d) Kim
et al. method [30]; (e) Gatos et al. method [6]; (f) Chou et al. method [27]; (g) Wagdy
et al. method [31]; (h) our proposed method.
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Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280
1
c (q ) =
1 + (q − q0 )2 (10)
where q is the instantaneous coefficient of variation. The definition of q
can be found in [23]. The q0 is defined by
⎛ C ⎞
q0 = ⎜ ⎟ MAD (∥∇ log Ixt , y ∥)
⎝ 2⎠ (11)
where MAD (∥∇ log Ixt , y ∥) is the median absolute deviation, which is
defined as
MAD (∥∇ log Ixt , y ∥) = medianI {|∥∇ log Ixt , y ∥ − medianI [∥∇ log Ixt , y ∥]|}
(12)
where C is a constant C=1.4826. Also, the symbols ∇, ∥ ∥ and
represent the gradient, gradient magnitude and absolute value, respec-
tively.
3.3.2. Preserve stroke connectivity
Due to the influence of brokenness, degradation and thresholding
in document images, the stroke connectivity are very difficult to
preserve. We proposed two steps to retrieve the strokes as shown in
the Fig. 7. In the first step, we extract the strokes of the characters
based on a combination of a simple feature point detection scheme and
a novel stroke segment connecting method [24] proposed by Lin et al.
So we first extract the character feature points based on Rutoviz's
definition of crossing number [25] for a pixel p. Then we can trace the
skeletons of the stroke segments from one feature point to the other.
Finally, we use a bi-directional graph method to determine which pair
of stroke segments needs to be connected at the fork point. After this
first step, we get the structure information for each character. In the
second step, a swell filter is used to fill all possible breaks, gaps or holes
in the characters. This swell filter is also combined with the bi-
directional graph built in the first step. If Psw is the number of black
pixel in a n × n sliding window, which has the white pixel (x,y) as the
central pixel in the connection road of bi-directional graph, and xa, ya
the average values for all black pixels in the n × n windows, then this
pixel is changed to black if Psw > ksw and |x − xa | < dx and |y − ya | < dy
where ksw is experimentally set as ksw = 0.001125*vh . vh is the largest
peak in a height histogram of the connected components. The latter two
conditions are used in order to prevent an increase in the thickness of
character strokes since we examine only white pixels among uniformly
distributed black pixels.
3.3.3. Improve quality of text regions
We further use swell filter to scan the entire binary image and each
white pixel is examined. Further more, an edge stopping function is
used to ensure sharp edges. The Lorentzian edge penalty function [26]
is employed to preservation of sharp edges. The Lorentzian edge
penalty function is defined by
⎧⎪ 1 ⎛ x ⎞⎫ ⎪
ρL (x ) = log ⎨1 + ⎜ ⎟ ⎬
⎩
⎪
2 ⎝ ρL ⎠ ⎭ ⎪
(13)
where ρL is called the contrast parameter, which controls the shape of
the edge-stopping function [26]. x is the pixel in the binary image.
Fig. 8 demonstrates the result after our post-process measure.
4. Experimental results and discussions
The experiments and evaluation were designed to test and analyze
the proposed method on various document images including broken
and poor degraded document images.
We test the proposed method on three types of document images:
historical handwritten documents, old newspapers and broken docu-
ments. All 150 images varies in noises, resolution, stroke size and
illumination contrast. Part of test data were collected from Chou et al
Y. Chen, L. Wang Neurocomputing 237 (2017) 272–280

Fig. 12. Binarization of an historical handwritten document image: (a) original document image; (b) Nibleck's method [28]; (c) Sauvola et al. method [29]; (d) Kim et al. method [30];
(e) Gatos et al. method [6]; (f) Chou et al. method [27]; (g) Wagdy et al. method [31]; (h) our proposed method.

[27]. The dataset contain 122 document images photographed by an
ORITE I-CAM 1300 onechip color camera. The authors set the camera
lens at about 6 cm from each document and captured a rectangular
region of approximately 4.9 × 3.4 cm which resulting a 320×240 pixels
grayscale image. Thus, the resolution of each captured image is about
166 dots per inch. Another 28 document images were collected from
internet for test. The sensitivity of the proposed method to parameter
settings of q, p1, and p2 is shown in the Fig. 9. The results suggest that
the following parameter values: q = 0.6, p1 = 0.5, p2 = 0.8 in the
experiments achieve a highest precision.
The Performance of our proposed method is compared with six
state-of-the-art binarization algorithms: Niblack's adaptive threshold-
ing method [28], Sauvola et al. adaptive method [29], Kim et al.
adaptive method [30], Gatos et al. adaptive method [6], Chou et al.
learning-built method [27], Wagdy et al. global thresholding method
[31].
4.1. Quantitative evaluation of performance
There are two goals for performance evaluation: effectiveness for
practice and effectiveness compared with other algorithms. Our
evaluation measures consist of the OCR system and PSNR value. To
verify the efficiency of the proposed binarization method, experiments
are performed on several well-known OCR systems including
Tesseract-2.01 OCR from Google, Microsoft Office Document
Scanning and ABBYY FineReader. Table 1 shows the binarization

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Fig. 13. Binarization of an historical handwritten document image: (a) original document image; (b) Nibleck's method [28]; (c) Sauvola et al. method [29]; (d) Kim et al. method [30];
(e) Gatos et al. method [6]; (f) Chou et al. method [27]; (g) Wagdy et al. method [31]; (h) our proposed method.

document image portions and the OCR results. In terms of OCR 2 × Recall × Precision
Fm =
performance, our method can achieve the same promising results as Recall + Precision (14)
Gatos et al. and outperform the others five methods for the example TP TP
where Recall = and Precision =
TP + FN
,
with TP, FP, and FN,
TP + FP
document image. It also produces 100% quality for OCR detection on
respectively, standing for true positive (total number of well-classified
the inadequate illumination condition. Corresponding PSNR values are
foreground pixels), false positive (total number of misclassified fore-
showed in Table 2. Throughout all the experiments, the proposed
ground pixels in binarization results compared to ground truth), and
method can achieve better improvement in binarization of broken and
false negative (total number of misclassified background pixels). The
degraded document images compared to other six approaches.
quantitative evaluation results are shown in Table 3. It is demonstrated
The assessment of the performance of our method against the
that our method outperform other six binarizaion methods in terms of
different cases is quantitatively analyzed with three metrics. According
average precision, recall and cost time over whole 150 document
to common evaluation protocols [32], we used the F-measure (Fm) in
images.
order to compare our method with other approaches. Fm is expressed
Figs. 10, 11, 12 and 13 show example documents that have severe
in percentage:
broken/scratches on the original documents. As a summary, we notice:
(1) Niblack's method suffer from a great amount of background noise,

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Y. Chen, L. Wang
(2) Sauvola et al. method has no background noise, but many
characters are broken, (3) Kim et al. approach achieves good result,
but remain much noises and characters broken, (4) Gatos et al.
performs well, but has many speckles, (5) Chou et al. method will
miss some strokes due to their method highly depends on learning
features; (6) Wagdy et al. method may fail to retrieve characters
because their method uses a global threshold; (5) compared with other
methods, our proposed algorithm performs superiorly in general
degraded document images. Particularly, the current method outper-
forms all algorithms in the document images which are poorly broken
and have high noise.
5. Conclusions and future work
We presents a new framework for degraded document image
binarization and restoring the quality of the document images. The
document images are pre-processed using the non-local means denois-
ing method in the first step. Then, we extend the Wellner's quick
adaptive thresholding method based on the histogram and use
Rosenfeld's method to determine the threshold for each pixel. To get
the pleasing binarization results, three measures are employed to post-
process the output thresholding document images in the final step,
which includes de-speckle, preserve strokes and improve quality of the
text regions. Experimental results and evaluation analysis show
significant improvement in the binarization of document images
collected from various sources including broken and degraded books,
magazines and document files. The improvement in recognition is
especially high for broken document images stuck by several torn
pieces.
The proposed method primarily uses a non-local means method to
remove noise from document image. Its computational cost is still
expensive. Integration of the non-local means denoising with adaptive
threshold could further improve the binarization performance.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation
of China (Grant nos. 61601392, 61671399), Research Fund for the
Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20130121120045) and by the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant no.
20720150110).
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Yiping Chen is currently a postdoc at the Xiamen
University. She got her Ph.D. degree in the School of
Electronic Engineering, National University of Defence
Technology, China. Her research interests include image
processing and 3D point cloud processing.
Liansheng Wang received the Ph.D. degree in Computer
Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012.
He is currently a Assistant Professor in the Department of
Computer Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China. His
research interests include medical image processing and
analysis.