Ink bleed-through binarization of Javanese handwritten ancient document using local adaptive threshold based on local class width

Abstract

Ink bleed-through is one of the degradations that usually appear in digitalization of ancient document. It makes the main text strongly hard to read. Consequently, binarization process is needed to split the main text and the background. Meanwhile, the popular binarization technique is thresholding and the common thresholding method does not work well to removes ink bleed-through degradation. Accordingly, we proposed new method using local adaptive threshold based on local class width. It has been done experimentally using Javanese handwritten ancient document named Babok Kalamadi, one of the collections in State Museum of Mpu Tantular, Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia. The document has ink bleed-through degradation and the proposed method achieves F-Measure and DRD that are: 91.33 and 3.58, 16.79 dB PSNR with 1361.17 MSE from the ground-truth measurement.