Image Thresholding

Keywords: binarization, grayscale-to-binary

Survey:

Sankur and Sezgin (2001) lists 44 binarization methods, categorized into six methods: histogram shape-based, clustering-based, entropy-based, object attribute-based, spatial, and local.
 

Glasbey, C. A. 1993. An analysis of histogram-based thresholding algorithm. Graphical Models and Image Processing, 55(6): 532-7. (11 algorithms).

Lee, S. U., S. Y. Chung, and R. H. Park. 1990. A comparative performance study of several global
 thresholding techniques for segmentation. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing 52: 171-90.

Pal, N. R., and S.K. Pal. 1993. A review on image segmentation techiniques. Pattern Recognition 26(9): 1277-94.

Sahoo, P. K., S. Soltani and A. K. C. Wang. 1988. A survey of thresholding techniques, Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing 41: 233-60.
 

Sankur, B., and M. Sezgin. 2001. Image Thresholding Techniques: A Survey over Categories. Pattern
    Recognition, 2001. (under review) (44 methods)

Taxt, T., P.J. Flynn, and A.K. Jain. 1989. Segmentation of document images. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 11(12): 1322-29.

Trier, O. D., and A. Jain. 1995. Goal-directed evaluation of binarization methods. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence17:1191-1201. (19 methods).

Trier, D., and T. Taxt. 1995. Evaluation of binarization methods for document Images, IEEE Transactions on
 Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence17: 312-15.

clustering (Otsu 1979)
moment-preserving method (Tsai 1984)
minimums-error method (Kittler and Illingworth 1986)
Entropy method

Otsu, N. 1979. A thresholding selection method from gray-level histogram. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics9(1): 62-66.

Tsai, W. H. 1985. Moment-preserving thresholding: A New Approach. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing 29: 377-393.