Binarization of Degraded Characters Using Tensor Voting Based Color Clustering

In this paper, a new method of binarizing degraded characters from scene images is presented. The proposed method helps in obtaining a binarized result even with multicolored characters subjected to heavy degradation. Color information is used in the proposed binarization method to help to separate the character from the image background and to obtain a clean representation of the final result. Images from the ICDAR 2003 robust character recognition database are used to compare the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed algorithm with other methods.