Transition pixel: A concept for binarization based on edge detection and gray-intensity histograms

This paper introduces a novel binarization method based on the concept of transition pixel, a generalization of edge pixels. Such pixels are characterized by extreme transition values computed using pixel-intensity differences in a small neighborhood. We show how to adjust the threshold of several binary threshold methods which compute gray-intensity thresholds, using the gray-intensity mean and variance of the pixels in the transition set. Our experiments show that the new approach yields segmentation performance superior to several with current state-of-the-art binarization algorithms. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved