Combination of Two Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Robust Binarization
Résumé
To be able to process historical documents, it is often required
to rst binarize the image (background and foreground separation)
before applying the processing itself. Historical documents are
challenging to binarize because of the numerous degradations they suffer
such as bleed-through, illuminations, background degradations or ink
drops. We present in this paper a new approach to tackle this task by a
combination of two neural networks. Recently, the DIBCO binarization
competition has seen a growing interest in the use of supervised methods
to binarize challenging images. Inspired by the winner of the DIBCO 17
competition, which uses a fully convolutional neural network (FCN), we
propose a combination of two FCNs to obtain better performance. While
the two FCNs have the same architecture, they are trained on dierent
representations of the input image. The rst one uses downscaled image
to capture the global context and the object locations. The second
one works on patches of native resolution to help dening precisely the
boundaries of the characters by capturing the local context. The nal
prediction is obtained by combining the results of the two FCNs. We
show in the experiments that this strategy provides better results and
outperforms the winner of the DIBCO17 competition.