An Objective Method to Evaluate Stroke-Width Measures for Binarized Documents

In this article, we propose an objective method to evaluate stroke-width measures. With this aim, we discuss the relevance of features based on the stroke width for document analysis. Then, we point out that most of the consulted references have a vague definition of stroke width. Because of this, we propose a formal definition of the stroke-width and remark the linearity of the stroke-width as an important property. Inspired by these ideas, we propose a measure together with a dataset to evaluate the linearity of the measurements of the stroke width and conduct an evaluation for seven well-known stroke-width methods. Our experiments have interesting results, like the fact that the most popular method is the one with the worst performance and that the best method is the easiest to implement. We hope that our objective evaluation assists further authors to choose suitable stroke-width methods for their applications.

I. Introduction

The efforts on document analysis to recognize and classify documents have lead to develop complex systems that are capable of dealing with problems such as irregular illumination [1], background patterns [2], and handwritten documents [3] to mention some. These systems exploit diverse pixel features extracted not only from the color/gray space, but also from the structural relation between pixels. In particular, the stroke width is one of these structural features.