In today’s digital age, the conversion of hardcopy documents into digital formats is widespread. This process involves electronically scanning and storing large volumes of documents. These documents come from various sources, including records and reports, camera-captured text and screen snapshots, official documents, newspapers, medical reports, music scores, and more. In the domain of document analysis techniques, an essential step is document image binarization. Its goal is to eliminate unnecessary data from images and preserve only the text. Despite the existence of multiple techniques for binarization, the presence of degradation in document images can hinder their efficacy. The objective of this work is to provide an extensive review and analysis of the document binarization field, emphasizing its importance and addressing the challenges encountered during the image binarization process. Additionally, it provides insights into techniques and methods employed for image binarization. The current paper also introduces benchmark datasets for evaluating binarization accuracy, model training, evaluation metrics, and the effectiveness of recent methods.

Thinning is an important process in several applications of computer vision. It aims to find the onepixel midline of the pattern in binary image. In spite of different thinning methods that have been...

A Printed PAW Image Database of Arabic Language for Document Analysis and Recognition

Clustering analysis is a significant technique in various fields, including unsupervised machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, and image analysis. Many clustering algorithms are currently used, but almost all of them encounter various challenges, such as low accuracy, required number of clusters, slow processing, inability to produce non-spherical shaped clusters, and unstable performance with respect to data characteristics and size. In this research, a novel clustering algorithm called the fast component density clustering in spatial databases (FCDCSD) is proposed by utilizing a density-based clustering technique to address the aforementioned existing challenges. First, from the smallest to the largest point in the spatial field, each point is labeled with a temporary value, and the adjacent values in one component are stored in a set. Then, all sets with shared values are merged and resolved to obtain a single value that is representative of the merged sets. These values represent final cluster values; that is, the temporary equivalents in the dataset are replaced to generate the final clusters. If some noise appears, then a post-process is performed, and values are assigned to the nearest cluster based on a set of rules. Various synthetic datasets were used in the experiments to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method. Results indicate that FCDCSD is generally superior to affinity propagation, agglomerative hierarchical, k-means, mean-shift, spectral, and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise, ordering points for identifying clustering structures, and Gaussian mixture clustering methods.

Cluster analysis is a crucial technique in unsupervised machine learning, pattern recognition, and data analysis. However, current clustering algorithms suffer from the need for manual determination of parameter values, low accuracy, and inconsistent performance concerning data size and structure. To address these challenges, a novel clustering algorithm called the fully automated density-based clustering method (FADBC) is proposed. The FADBC method consists of two stages: parameter selection and cluster extraction. In the first stage, a proposed method extracts optimal parameters for the dataset, including the epsilon size and a minimum number of points thresholds. These parameters are then used in a density-based technique to scan each point in the dataset and evaluate neighborhood densities to find clusters. The proposed method was evaluated on different benchmark datasets and metrics, and the experimental results demonstrate its competitive performance without requiring manual inputs. The results show that the FADBC method outperforms well-known clustering methods such as the agglomerative hierarchical method, k-means, spectral clustering, DBSCAN, FCDCSD, Gaussian mixtures, and density-based spatial clustering methods. It can handle any kind of data set well and perform excellently.