Complex and degraded color document image binarization

We present a document binarization scheme that is intended at consistently binarizing a range of degraded color document images. The proposed solution makes use of a mean-shift algorithm based segmentation applied at different scales of the image and a contrast enhanced version of the popular Niblack's thresholding method. The solution has been evaluated using standard metrics used in a prominent binarization competition and has also been subject to an end-to-end evaluation by use in an OCR system. The proposed solution was found to perform at par or better than existing state of the art binarization solutions and was found to always be more consistent in performance than the state of the art.