Ground-truth estimation in multispectral representation space: application to degraded document image binarization

Human ground-truthing is the manual labelling of samples (pixels for example) to generate reference data without any automatic algorithm help. Although a manual ground-truth is more accurate than a machine ground-truth, it still suffers from mislabeling and/or judgement errors. In this paper we propose a new method of ground-truth estimation using multispectral (MS) imaging feature space for the sake of document image binarization. Starting from the initial manual ground-truth, the proposed classification method aims to select automatically some samples with correct labels (well-labeled pixels) from each class for the training phase, then reassign new labels to the document image pixels. The classification scheme is based on the cooperation of multiple classifiers under some constraints. A real data set of MS historical document images and their ground-truth is created(1) (see url bellow) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method of ground-truth estimation.