Optimizing Speed For Adaptive Local Thresholding Algorithm U sing Dynamic Programing

Image binarization using a global threshold value [3] performs at high speed, but usually results in undesired binary images when the source images are of poor quality. In such cases, adaptive local thresholding algorithms [1][2][3] are used to obtain better results, and the algorithm proposed by A.E.Savekis which chooses local threshold using fore­ground and background clustering [1] is one of the best thresholding algorithms. However, this algorithm runs slowly due to its re-computing threshold value of each central pixel in a local window MxM. In this paper, we present a dynamic programming approach for the step of calculating local threshold value that reduces many redundant computations and improves the execution speed significantly. Experiments show that our proposal improvement runs more ten times faster than the original algorithm.