• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.491-500
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• 2013

A connected component analysis from a binary image is a popular character segmentation method but occasionally fails to segment the characters owing to image noise and uneven illumination. A multimethod binarization scheme that incorporates two or more binary images is a novel solution, but selection of binarization methods has never been analyzed before. This paper reveals the best combination of binarization methods and parameters and presents an in-depth analysis of the multimethod binarization scheme for better character segmentation. We carry out an extensive quantitative evaluation, which shows a significant improvement over conventional single-method binarization methods. Experiment results of six binarization methods and their combinations with different test images are presented.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.9
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• pp.797-803
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• 2007

Adaptive binarization is very important for the camera-based document recognition. This paper proposes a binarization method which can effectively adapt to the variation of image Qualify. Firstly, it analyzes the effect of binarization parameters to the result and proposes a method to measure the image quality. Then, it statistically analyzes the relationship between the image quality and the binarization parameter. Finally, it proposes a binarization method that automatically adapts to the quality of the input image, using the analysis result. The experiment results show that there is a meaningful relationship between the image quality and the binarization parameter, and therefore, the proposed method can effectively adapt to the variation of image quality.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.27-34
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• 2012

In this paper, a novel text binarization is presented that can deal with some complex conditions, such as shadows, non-uniform illumination due to highlight or object projection, and messy backgrounds. To locate the target text region, a focus line is assumed to pass through a text region. Next, connected component analysis and stroke width estimation based on location information of the focus line is used to locate the bounding box of the text region, and each box of connected components. A series of classifications are applied to identify whether each CC(Connected component) is text or non-text. Also, a modified K-means clustering method based on an HCL color space is applied to reduce the color dimension. A text binarization procedure based on location of text component and seed color pixel is then used to generate the final result.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.231-236
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• 2011

The binarization algorithm frequently applies to one part of the preprocessing phase for a variety of image processing techniques such as image recognition and image analysis, etc. So it is important that binarization algorithm is determined by the selection of threshold value for binarization in image processing. The previous algorithms could get the proper threshold value in the case that shows all the difference of brightness between background and object, but if not, they could not get the proper threshold value. In this paper, we propose the efficient fuzzy binarization method which first, segments the brightness range of gray_scale images to 2 intervals to perform car license plate binarization and applies fuzzy member function to each intervals. The experiment for performance evaluation of the proposed binarization algorithm showed that the proposed algorithm generates the more effective threshold value than the previous algorithms in car license plate.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1778-1797
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• 2021

Document image binarization is an important pre-processing step in document analysis and archiving. The state-of-the-art models for document image binarization are variants of encoder-decoder architectures, such as FCN (fully convolutional network) and U-Net. Despite their success, they still suffer from three limitations: (1) reduced feature map resolution due to consecutive strided pooling or convolutions, (2) multiple scales of target objects, and (3) reduced localization accuracy due to the built-in invariance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). To overcome these three challenges, we propose an improved semantic segmentation model, referred to as DP-LinkNet, which adopts the D-LinkNet architecture as its backbone, with the proposed hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) and spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) modules between the encoder and the decoder. Extensive experiments are conducted on recent document image binarization competition (DIBCO) and handwritten document image binarization competition (H-DIBCO) benchmark datasets. Results show that our proposed DP-LinkNet outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques by a large margin. Our implementation and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/beargolden/DP-LinkNet.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.2924-2932
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• 2015

Image binarization is a process to divide the image into objects and backgrounds, widely applied to the fields of image analysis and its recognition. In the existing method of binarization, there is some uncertainty when there is insufficient brightness gap between objects and backgrounds in setting threshold. The method of fuzzy binarization has improved the features of objects efficiently. However, since this method sets ${\alpha}$-cut value statically, there remain some problems that important features of objects can be lost during binarization. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a binarization method which does not set ${\alpha}$-cut value statically. The proposed method uses fuzzy membership functions calculated by thresholds of mean, iterative, and Otsu binarization. Experiment results show the proposed method binaries various images with less loss than the existing methods.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.11C
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• pp.1140-1151
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• 2003

This paper proposes a face recognition method based on modified Otsu's binarization and Hu moment. Proposed method is robust to brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes. As the proposed modified Otsu's binarization computes other thresholds from conventional Otsu's binarization, namely we create two binary images, we can extract higher dimensional feature vector. Here the feature vector has properties of robustness to brightness and contrast changes because the proposed method is based on Otsu's binarization. And our face recognition system is robust to scale, rotation, and translation changes because of using Hu moment. In the perspective of brightness, contrast, scale, rotation, and translation changes, experimental results with Olivetti Research Laboratory (ORL) database and the AR database showed that average recognition rates of conventional well-known principal component analysis (PCA) are 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed method for the same databases has superior performance of the average recognition rates of 93.2% and 81.4%, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1269-1274
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• 2014

In computer vision research, binarization procedure is one of the most frequently used tools to discriminate target objects from background in grey level binary image. Fuzzy binarization is a reliable technique in environment with high uncertainty such as medical image analysis by setting the threshold as the average of minimum and maximum brightness with triangle type fuzzy membership function. However, this technique is also known as contrast sensitive method thus its discrimination power is not so great when the image has low contrast difference between objects and backgrounds and suffer from information loss as a result. Thus, in this paper, we propose a fuzzy binarization using ART2 algorithm to handle such low contrast image analysis. Proposed ART2 algorithm is applied to determine the medium point of membership function in the fuzzy binarization paradigm. The proposed methods shows low information loss rate in our experiment.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.721-726
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• 2004

The image binarization is applied frequently as one part of the preprocessing phase for a variety of image processing techniques such as character recognition and image analysis, etc. The performance of binarization algorithms is determined by the selection of threshold value for binarization, and most of the previous binarization algorithms analyze the intensity distribution of the original images by using the histogram and determine the threshold value using the mean value of Intensity or the intensity value corresponding to the valley of the histogram. The previous algorithms could not get the proper threshold value in the case that doesn't show the bimodal characteristic in the intensity histogram or for the case that tries to separate the feature area from the original image. So, this paper proposed the novel algorithm for image binarization, which, first, segments the intensity range of grayscale images to several intervals and calculates mean value of intensity for each interval, and next, repeats the interval integration until getting the final threshold value. The interval integration of two neighborhood intervals calculates the ratio of the distances between mean value and adjacent boundary value of two intervals and determine as the threshold value of the new integrated interval the intensity value that divides the distance between mean values of two intervals according to the ratio. The experiment for performance evaluation of the proposed binarization algorithm showed that the proposed algorithm generates the more effective threshold value than the previous algorithms.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.65 no.9
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• pp.1531-1540
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose vehicle license plate recognition system based on Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNNs) with the use of local binarization functions and canny edge algorithm. In order to detect the area of license plate and also recognize license plate numbers, binary images are generated by using local binarization methods, which consider local brightness, and canny edge detection. The generated binary images provide information related to the size and the position of license plate. Additionally, image warping is used to compensate the distortion of images obtained from the side. After extracting license plate numbers, the dimensionality of number images is reduced through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and is used as input variables to RBFNNs. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to optimize a number of essential parameters needed to improve the accuracy of RBFNNs. Those optimized parameters include the number of clusters and the fuzzification coefficient used in the FCM algorithm, and the orders of polynomial of networks. Image data sets are obtained by changing the distance between stationary vehicle and camera and then used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system.