Use of SLIC superpixels for ancient document image enhancement and segmentation

Designing reliable and fast segmentation algorithms of ancient documents has been a topic of major interest for many libraries and the prime issue of research in the document analysis community. Thus, we propose in this article a fast ancient document enhancement and segmentation algorithm based on using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) superpixels and Gabor descriptors in a multi-scale approach. Firstly, in order to obtain enhanced backgrounds of noisy ancient documents, a novel foreground/background segmentation algorithm based on SLIC superpixels, is introduced. Once, the SLIC technique is carried out, the background and foreground superpixels are classified. Then, an enhanced and non-noisy background is achieved after processing the background superpixels. Subsequently, Gabor descriptors are only extracted from the selected foreground superpixels of the enhanced gray-level ancient book document images by adopting a multi-scale approach. Finally, for ancient document image segmentation, a foreground superpixel clustering task is performed by partitioning Gabor-based feature sets into compact and well-separated clusters in the feature space. The proposed algorithm does not assume any a priori information regarding document image content and structure and provides interesting results on a large corpus of ancient documents. Qualitative and numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the enhancement and segmentation quality.