Skew correction of business card images in PDA

We present an efficient algorithm for skew correction of business card images obtained by a PDA camera. -The proposed method is composed of four parts: block adaptive binarization (BAB), stripe generation, skew angle calculation, and image rotation. In the BAB, an input image is binarized block by block so as to lessen the effects of irregular illumination and shadows over the input image. In the stripe generation, character string clusters are generated merging character strings and their inter-spaces, and then only clusters useful for skew angle calculation are output as stripes. In the skew angle calculation, the direction angles of the stripes are calculated using their central moments and then the skew angle of the input image is determined averaging the direction angles. In the image rotation, the input image is rotated by the skew angle. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields correction rates of 100% for business card images in normal conditions and about 90% for those in ill conditions.