A Framework for the Selection of Binarization Techniques on Palm Leaf Manuscripts Using Support Vector Machine

Abstract

Challenges for text processing in ancient document images are mainly due to the high degree of variations in foreground and background. Image binarization is an image segmentation technique used to separate the image into text and background components. Although several techniques for binarizing text documents have been proposed, the performance of these techniques varies and depends on the image characteristics. Therefore, selecting binarization techniques can be a key idea to achieve improved results. This paper proposes a framework for selecting binarizing techniques of palm leaf manuscripts using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The overall process is divided into three steps: (i) feature extraction: feature patterns are extracted from grayscale images based on global intensity, local contrast, and intensity; (ii) treatment of imbalanced data: imbalanced dataset is balanced by using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique as to improve the performance of prediction; and (iii) selection: SVM is applied in order to select the appropriate binarization techniques. The proposed framework has been evaluated with palm leaf manuscript images and benchmarking dataset from DIBCO series and compared the performance of prediction between imbalanced and balanced datasets. Experimental results showed that the proposed framework can be used as an integral part of an automatic selection process.