A hidden Markov model-based character extraction method

In this paper a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based binarization algorithm is presented. This algorithm performs well for images with nonuniform background. To test the usefullness of the proposed technique some images of composite documents of printed characters were used. These characters were extracted through the proposed binarization algorithms and used in a commercial OCR. A comparative study of various binarization techniques is also presented.