Adaptive Binarization for Vehicle State Images Based on Contrast Preserving Decolorization and Major Cluster Estimation

Abstract

A new adaptive binarization method is proposed for the vehicle state images obtained from the intelligent operation and maintenance system of rail transit. The method can check the corresponding vehicle status information in the intelligent operation and maintenance system of rail transit more quickly and effectively, track and monitor the vehicle operation status in real time, and improve the emergency response ability of the system. The advantages of the proposed method mainly include two points. For decolorization, we use the method of contrast preserving decolorization[1] obtain the appropriate ratio of R, G, and B for the grayscale of the RGB image which can retain the color information of the vehicle state images background to the maximum, and maintain the contrast between the foreground and the background. In terms of threshold selection, the mean value and standard deviation of gray value corresponding to multi-color background of vehicle state images are obtained by using major cluster estimation[2], and the adaptive threshold is determined by the 2 sigma principle for binarization, which can extract text, identifier and other target information effectively. The experimental results show that, regarding the vehicle state images with rich background color information, this method is better than the traditional binarization methods, such as the global threshold Otsu algorithm[3] and the local threshold Sauvola algorithm[4],[5] based on threshold, Mean-Shift algorithm[6], K-Means algorithm[7] and Fuzzy C Means[8] algorithm based on statistical learning. As an image preprocessing scheme for intelligent rail transit data verification, the method can improve the accuracy of text and identifier recognition effectively by verifying the optical character recognition through a data set containing images of different vehicle statuses.