Evolution of Degraded Historical Manuscripts Binarization Techniques - A Review

In the modern world, physical documents are increasingly being converted into digital formats. This process includes storing and preserving large volumes of documents through electronic scanning. These documents mainly include ancient handwritten palm leaf manuscripts, old legal records, scientific literature, historic letters and newspaper articles. Particularly, the degradation of ink and the writing medium makes ancient and historical manuscripts difficult to comprehend. Degraded document binarization has received extensive study recently, and a number of strategies have been created to address its problems and difficulties. The obstacles and difficulties encountered throughout the image binarization process are thoroughly reviewed in this study, and then insights into the various methods employed are provided. This paper also explores cutting-edge techniques for document augmentation that boost deteriorated documents' quality during binarization. We further discuss the efficacy and reliability of current approaches, and the scope to build a hybrid strategy that can effectively and efficiently handle the binarization of degraded historical documents