• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.721-726
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• 2004

The image binarization is applied frequently as one part of the preprocessing phase for a variety of image processing techniques such as character recognition and image analysis, etc. The performance of binarization algorithms is determined by the selection of threshold value for binarization, and most of the previous binarization algorithms analyze the intensity distribution of the original images by using the histogram and determine the threshold value using the mean value of Intensity or the intensity value corresponding to the valley of the histogram. The previous algorithms could not get the proper threshold value in the case that doesn't show the bimodal characteristic in the intensity histogram or for the case that tries to separate the feature area from the original image. So, this paper proposed the novel algorithm for image binarization, which, first, segments the intensity range of grayscale images to several intervals and calculates mean value of intensity for each interval, and next, repeats the interval integration until getting the final threshold value. The interval integration of two neighborhood intervals calculates the ratio of the distances between mean value and adjacent boundary value of two intervals and determine as the threshold value of the new integrated interval the intensity value that divides the distance between mean values of two intervals according to the ratio. The experiment for performance evaluation of the proposed binarization algorithm showed that the proposed algorithm generates the more effective threshold value than the previous algorithms.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.55-68
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• 2014

Automatic segmentation of foreground text from the background in degraded document images is very much essential for the smooth reading of the document content and recognition tasks by machine. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the binarization of degraded document images. The proposed method uses a new local contrast feature extracted based on the stroke width of text. First, a pre-processing method is carried out for noise removal. Text boundary detection is then performed on the image constructed from the contrast feature. Then local estimation follows to extract text from the background. Finally, a refinement procedure is applied to the binarized image as a post-processing step to improve the quality of the final results. Experiments and comparisons of extracting text from degraded handwriting and machine-printed document image against some well-known binarization algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.161-166
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• 2011

We present a fast algorithm for Korean text extraction and segmentation from subway signboards using smart phone sensors in order to minimize computational time and memory usage. The algorithm can be used as preprocessing steps for optical character recognition (OCR): binarization, text location, and segmentation. An image of a signboard captured by smart phone camera while holding smart phone by an arbitrary angle is rotated by the detected angle, as if the image was taken by holding a smart phone horizontally. Binarization is only performed once on the subset of connected components instead of the whole image area, resulting in a large reduction in computational time. Text location is guided by user's marker-line placed over the region of interest in binarized image via smart phone touch screen. Then, text segmentation utilizes the data of connected components received in the binarization step, and cuts the string into individual images for designated characters. The resulting data could be used as OCR input, hence solving the most difficult part of OCR on text area included in natural scene images. The experimental results showed that the binarization algorithm of our method is 3.5 and 3.7 times faster than Niblack and Sauvola adaptive-thresholding algorithms, respectively. In addition, our method achieved better quality than other methods.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.845-852
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a binarization algorithm using LVQ-Merge clustering method for fast and accurate extraction of cells from cell images. The proposed method clusters pixel data of a given image by using LVQ to remove noise and divides the result into two clusters by applying a hierarchical clustering algorithm to improve the accuracy of binarization. As a result, the execution speed is somewhat slower than that of the conventional LVQ or Otsu algorithm. However, the results of the binarization have very good quality and are almost identical to those judged by the human eye. Especially, the bigger and the more complex the image, the better the binarization quality. This suggests that the proposed method is a useful method for medical image processing field where high-resolution and huge medical images must be processed in real time. In addition, this method is possible to have many clusters instead of two cluster, so it can be used as a method to complement a hierarchical clustering algorithm.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.843-852
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• 2015

Binarization of document images is a critical pre-processing step required for character recognition. Even though various research efforts have been devoted, the quality of binarization results largely depends on the noise amount and condition of images. We propose a new binarization method that combines Maximally Stable External Region(MSER) with down-sampling. Particularly, we propose to apply different threshold values for character regions, which turns out to be effective in reducing noise. Through a set of experiments on test images, we confirmed that the proposed method was superior to existing methods in reducing noise, while the increase of execution time is limited.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.14-20
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• 2003

This paper presents a text extraction method of camera based document image. It is more difficult to recognize camera based document image in comparison with scanner based image because of segmentation problem due to variable lighting condition and versatile fonts. Both document binarization and character extraction are important processes to recognize camera based document image. After converting color image into grey level image, gray level normalization is used to extract character region independent of lighting condition and background image. Local adaptive binarization method is then used to extract character from the background after the removal of noise. In this character extraction step, the information of the horizontal and vertical projection and the connected components is used to extract character line, word region and character region. To evaluate the proposed method, we have experimented with documents mixed Hangul, English, symbols and digits of the ETRI database. An encouraging binarization and character extraction results have been obtained.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.56-63
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• 2014

This paper deals with a binarization for plate number recognition. The binarization process converts an image into a binary image and plays an important role for automatically recognizing plate number. The rear license plate has often a shadowed image which causes erroneous binarized image due to non-uniform illumination. In this paper, a binarization method is proposed in which the shadow line is detected in a rear plate with a shadow. And then the histogram matching is conducted for the two image separated by the shadow line. After histogram matching, two images are joined and finally Otsu method is applied for the binarization. In the experiment, the proposed algorithm shows robust performance compared to the conventional method in the presence of estimation error in the shadow line.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1-13
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a method to solve a problem in binarizing the rear number plate image captured by a camera on a moving vehicle. An image may be shadowed by the cavernous structure of the rear side of a moving vehicle and it makes us hard to get a high quality of binary image. Therefore, we first detect a shadow edge and then divide an image into the shadow part and non-shadow part by the edge. Finally, the binary image is obtained by binarizing each part and merging them In this paper, we do comparative work on a group of binarization methods including our method, the method suggested by Zheng, the method using block binarization, and the method using labeling. The result shows that our method achieves better performance than others in most cases.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.540-546
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• 2019

This study suggests a binarization method that minimizes information loss for night illumination images. The object of the night illumination image is an image which is not focused due to the influence of illumination and is not identifiable. Also, the image has a brightness area in only a part of the brightness histogram. So the existing simple binarization method is hard to get good results. The proposed binarization method uses image segmentation method and image merging method. In the stepwise divided blocks, we divide into two regions using the triangular type of fuzzy logic. The value 0 of the membership degree is binarized at the present step, and the value of the membership degree 1 is binarized after the next step. Experimental results show that night illumination images with minimal loss of information can be obtained in a dark area brightness range.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.10 no.10
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• pp.1877-1884
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• 2006

Image binarization is an important preprocessing to identify objects of interest by dividing pixels into background and objects. Usually binarization methods are classified into global and local thresholding approaches. In this paper, we propose an efficient and adaptive binarization method for the character segmentation by combining both advantages of the global and the local thresholding methods. Experimental results with the korean character images present that the proposed method binarizes character image faster and better than other local binarization methods.