# Variational Augmentation for Enhancing Historical Document Image Binarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06581/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [Adversarially Learned Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00704/) (2016)
- [Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04382/) (2016)
- [DE-GAN: A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Document Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08764/) (2020)
- [DocEnTr: An End-to-End Document Image Enhancement Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10252/) (2022)
- [Document Image Binarization with Fully Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03276/) (2017)
- [A selectional auto-encoder approach for document image binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.10241/) (2017)
- [Improving Document Binarization via Adversarial Noise-Texture Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11120/) (2018)
- [Two-stage generative adversarial networks for document image binarization with color noise and background removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10103/) (2020)
- [UDBNET: Unsupervised Document Binarization Network via Adversarial Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07075/) (2020)
- [DocEmul: a Toolkit to Generate Structured Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03474/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Historical Document Image Binarization is a well-known segmentation problem in image processing. Despite ubiquity, traditional thresholding algorithms achieved limited success on severely degraded document images. With the advent of deep learning, several segmentation models were proposed that made significant progress in the field but were limited by the unavailability of large training datasets. To mitigate this problem, we have proposed a novel two-stage framework -- the first of which comprises a generator that generates degraded samples using variational inference and the second being a CNN-based binarization network that trains on the generated data. We evaluated our framework on a range of DIBCO datasets, where it achieved competitive results against previous state-of-the-art methods.