A Speed-up method of document image binarization using water flow model

Water flow model을 이용한 문서영상 이진화의 속도 개선

This paper proposes a method to speed up the document image binarization using a water flow model. The proposed method extracts the region of interest (ROI) around characters from a document image and restricts pouring water onto a 3-dimensional terrain surface of an image only within the ROI. The amount of water to be filled into a local valley is determined automatically depending on its depth and slope. Then, the proposed method accumulates weighted water not only on the locally lowest position but also on its neighbors. Finally, the depth of each pond is adaptively thresholded for robust character segmentation. Experimental results on real document images shows that the proposed method has attained good binarization performance as well as remarkably reduced processing time compared with that of the existing method based on a water flow model.