Text separation in document images through Otsu's method

In the process of analyzing the document images, the text separation from the background plays a vital role. If the quality of document image is good, then text can be separated very easily by applying simple techniques of thresholding. Whereas, in noisy images it requires very accurate analysis. Various thresholding techniques that are available are efficient and produce better results, but they are very slow in that they require threshold calculation for each and every pixel. In this paper, we overcome this problem by proposing an Otsu's method in which it follows a recursive method for segmenting an image. The experimental results show that the proposed Otsu's approach is able to extract the text very effectively from its background even if the input is a noisy image.