Document binarization with automatic parameter tuning

Document analysis systems often begin with binarization as a first processing stage. Although numerous techniques for binarization have been proposed, the results produced can vary in quality and often prove sensitive to the settings of one or more control parameters. This paper examines a promising approach to binarization based upon simple principles, and shows that its success depends most significantly upon the values of two key parameters. It further describes an automatic technique for setting these parameters in a manner that tunes them to the individual image, yielding a final binarization algorithm that can cut total error by one-third with respect to the baseline version. The results of this method advance the state of the art on recent benchmarks.