An active contour based method for image binarization: Application to degraded historical document images

Old document images often suffer from degradations that render their binarization a challenging task. In this paper, a new binarization method for degraded document images is presented. The method is based on active contours evolving according to intrinsic geometric measures of the document image; Niblack's thresholding is also used to control the active contour propagation. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated on both recent and historical document images including different types of degradations, the results are compared with a number of known techniques in the literature.