Exposure Bracketing Techniques for Camera Document Image Enhancement

Abstract

Capturing document images using digital cameras in uneven lighting conditions is challenging, leading to poorly captured images, which hinders the processing that follows, such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In this paper, we propose the use of exposure bracketing techniques to solve this problem. Instead of capturing one image, we used several images that were captured with different exposure settings and used the exposure bracketing technique to generate a high-quality image that incorporates useful information from each image. We found that this technique can enhance image quality and provides an effective way of improving OCR accuracy. Our contributions in this paper are two-fold: (1) a preprocessing chain that uses exposure bracketing techniques for document images is discussed, and an automatic registration method is proposed to find the geometric disparity between multiple document images, which lays the foundation for exposure bracketing; (2) several representative exposure bracketing algorithms are incorporated in the processing chain and their performances are evaluated and compared.