Comparing background elimination approaches for processing of ancient Thai manuscipts on palm leaves

The objective of the Preservation of Palm Leaf Manuscripts Project at Mahasarakham University at Thailand is to preserve and retrieve traditional knowledge from ancient manuscripts recorded on palm leaves. An essential task in the process is to recognize the ancient characters automatically through image processing techniques. The paper compares different background elimination approaches which could be used. The aim is to improve the global and local adaptive thresholding techniques intelligently, and to form the pre-processing procedure in the automated process.