Skip to main content

Historical Handwritten Document Image Segmentation Using Morphology

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 298))

Abstract

Automatic recovery of text from historical documents is a difficult task due to their degradation because of different types of noise. Applying a global threshold or a chosen threshold based on visual intuition misses the finer handwritten text with low intensity values. These low intensity text are actually considered as a part of background when applying global threshold and are neglected. A single threshold is unable to segment the whole image clearly as various levels of intensities are present in text because of degradation. For restoration of missing texts we propose a thresholding algorithm based on mathematical morphology, which generates very fine adaptive threshold. After applying global threshold, left out background image consists of some mixed image background and handwritten text intensities on which we apply mathematical morphology (opening and closing), which produces a smooth contour and gives an adaptive threshold. The resultant thresholded image have clear uniform background and foreground with enhanced character appearance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Otsu N (1978) A threshold selection method from grey level histogram. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern SMC8:62–66

    Google Scholar 

  2. Pun T (1989) A new method for gray-level picture threshoding using entropy of the histogram. Signal Process 2:223–237

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Pun T (1981) Entropy thresholding: a new approach. Comput Vis Graphics Image Process 16:210–239

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Leedham G, Varma S, Patankar A, Govindaraju V (2002) Separating text and background in de-graded document images—a comparison of global thresholding techniques for multi-stage thresholding. In: Proceedings of eighth international workshop on frontiers of handwriting recognition, Sept 2002, pp 244–249

    Google Scholar 

  5. Mallikarjunaswamy BP, Karunakara K (2011) Graph based approach for background elimination and segmentation of the image. Res J Comput Syst Eng 02(02)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Mello CAB, Lins RD (2002) Generation of images of historical documents by composition. In: ACM symposium on document engineering, McLean, VA, USA, p 127–133

    Google Scholar 

  7. Leedham G, Yan C, Takru K, Tan JHN, Mian L (2003) Comparison of some thresholding algorithims for text/background segmentation in difficult document images. In: Proceedings of the seventh international conference on document analysis and recognition(ICDAR 2003), IEEE

    Google Scholar 

  8. Yan C, Leedham G (2004) Decompose-threshold approach to handwriting extraction in degraded historical document images. In: Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on frontiers in handwriting recognition (IWFHR-9 2004), IEEE

    Google Scholar 

  9. Shi Z, Govindaraju V (2004) Historical document image enhancement using background light intensity normalization, ICPR 2004. In: 17th international conference on pattern recognition, Cambridge, United Kingdon, 23–26 Aug 2004

    Google Scholar 

  10. Wang Z, Bovik AC, Sheikh HR (2004) Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity. IEEE Trans Image Process 13(4):600–612

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bishakha Roy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer India

About this paper

Cite this paper

Roy, B., Chatterjee, R.K. (2014). Historical Handwritten Document Image Segmentation Using Morphology. In: Sengupta, S., Das, K., Khan, G. (eds) Emerging Trends in Computing and Communication. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 298. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1817-3_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1817-3_14

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New Delhi

  • Print ISBN: 978-81-322-1816-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-81-322-1817-3

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics