Modified majority voting algorithm towards creating reference image for binarization

Abstract

The quantitative evaluation of different binarization techniques to measure their comparative performance is indeed an important aspect towards avoiding subjective evaluation. However, in majority of the papers found in the literature, creating a reference image is based on manual processing. These are often highly subjective and prone to human error. No single binarization technique so far has been found to produce consistently good results for all types of textual and graphic images. Thus creating a reference image indeed remains an unsolved problem. As found in the majority voting approach, a strong bias, due to poor computation of threshold by one or two methods for a particular image, has often had an adverse effect in computing the threshold for the reference image. The improvement proposed in this paper helps eliminate this bias to a great extent. Experimental verification using images from a standard database illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.