Papers › Memory-efficient and fast implementation of local adaptive binarization methods

Memory-efficient and fast implementation of local adaptive binarization methods

30 May 2019arXiv:1905.13038archive 2025-07-28

Chungkwong Chan

Binarization is widely used as an image preprocessing step to separate object especially text from background before recognition. For noisy images with uneven illumination such as degraded documents, threshold values need to be computed pixel by pixel to obtain a good segmentation. Since local threshold values typically depend on moment-based statistics such as mean and variance of gray levels inside rectangular windows, integral images which are memory consuming are commonly used to accelerate the calculation. Observed that moment-based statistics as well as quantiles in a sliding window can be computed recursively, integral images can be avoided without neglecting speed, more binarization methods can be accelerated too. In particular, given a H×W input image, Sauvola's method and alike can run in Θ(HW) time independent of window size, while only around 6min{H,W} bytes of auxiliary space is needed, which is significantly lower than the 16HW bytes occupied by the two integral images. Since the proposed technique enable various well-known local adaptive binarization methods to be applied in real-time use cases on devices with limited resources, it has the potential of wide application.

PaperPDFCode

Code

chungkwong/binarizer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Binarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections