# Three-stage binarization of color document images based on discrete wavelet transform and generative adversarial networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [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)
- [TorMentor: Deterministic dynamic-path, data augmentations with fractals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03776/) (2022)
- [Persian Heritage Image Binarization Competition (PHIBC 2012)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6263/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Splicing Detection and Localization In Satellite Imagery Using Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01805/) (2022)
- [Robust Regression For Image Binarization Under Heavy Noises and Nonuniform Background](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08078/) (2016)
- [Staff line Removal using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07141/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Binarizing Documents by Leveraging both Space and Frequency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17243/) (2024)
- [Volumetric Fast Fourier Convolution for Detecting Ink on the Carbonized Herculaneum Papyri](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05070/) (2023)
- [Efficient Generative Adversarial Networks for Color Document Image Enhancement and Binarization Using Multi-scale Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04231/) (2024)
- [DKDS: A Benchmark Dataset of Degraded Kuzushiji Documents with Seals for Detection and Binarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09117/) (2025)
- [MFE-GAN: Efficient GAN-based Framework for Document Image Enhancement and Binarization with Multi-scale Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14114/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The efficient extraction of text information from the background in degraded color document images is an important challenge in the preservation of ancient manuscripts. The imperfect preservation of ancient manuscripts has led to different types of degradation over time, such as page yellowing, staining, and ink bleeding, seriously affecting the results of document image binarization. This work proposes an effective three-stage network method to image enhancement and binarization of degraded documents using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Specifically, in Stage-1, we first split the input images into multiple patches, and then split these patches into four single-channel patch images (gray, red, green, and blue). Then, three single-channel patch images (red, green, and blue) are processed by the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with normalization. In Stage-2, we use four independent generators to separately train GAN models based on the four channels on the processed patch images to extract color foreground information. Finally, in Stage-3, we train two independent GAN models on the outputs of Stage-2 and the resized original input images (512x512) as the local and global predictions to obtain the final outputs. The experimental results show that the Avg-Score metrics of the proposed method are 77.64, 77.95, 79.05, 76.38, 75.34, and 77.00 on the (H)-DIBCO 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018 datasets, which are at the state-of-the-art level. The implementation code for this work is available at https://github.com/abcpp12383/ThreeStageBinarization.