{"title":"Binarising camera images for OCR","authors":"M. Seeger, C. Dance","doi":"10.1109/ICDAR.2001.953754","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We describe a binarisation method designed specifically for OCR of low quality camera images: background surface thresholding or BST. This method is robust to lighting variations and produces images with very little noise and consistent stroke width. BST computes a \"surface\" of background intensities at every point in the image and performs adaptive thresholding based on this result. The surface is estimated by identifying regions of low-resolution text and interpolating neighbouring background intensities into these regions. The final threshold is a combination of this surface and a global offset. According to our evaluation BST produces considerably fewer OCR errors than Niblack's local average method while also being more runtime efficient.","PeriodicalId":277816,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2001-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"75","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDAR.2001.953754","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 75
Abstract
We describe a binarisation method designed specifically for OCR of low quality camera images: background surface thresholding or BST. This method is robust to lighting variations and produces images with very little noise and consistent stroke width. BST computes a "surface" of background intensities at every point in the image and performs adaptive thresholding based on this result. The surface is estimated by identifying regions of low-resolution text and interpolating neighbouring background intensities into these regions. The final threshold is a combination of this surface and a global offset. According to our evaluation BST produces considerably fewer OCR errors than Niblack's local average method while also being more runtime efficient.