Page frame detection for double page document images

Scanning two book pages at the same time helps to accelerate the scanning process but on the other hand introduces several difficulties if the user needs to have one page per image. A major difficulty is the appearance of noisy black borders around text areas as well as of noisy black stripes between the two pages. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for detecting the page frames on double page document images. Our aim is to split the image into the two pages as well as to remove noisy borders. First we apply a pre-processing which includes binarization, noise removal and image smoothing. Then, we detect the vertical zones of the two pages. In this stage, we introduce the vertical white run projections which have been proved efficient for detecting vertical zones of text areas. Finally, the horizontal zones of the two pages are detected based on horizontal white run projections. The experimental results on several double page document images from fifteen different books demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.