Variational image binarization and its multi-scale realizations

A variational approach for image binarization is discussed in this paper. The approach is based on the interpolation of surface. This interpolation is computed using edge points as interpolating points and minimizing an energy functional which interpolates a smooth threshold surface. A globally convergent Sequential Relaxation Algorithm (SRA) is proposed for solving the optimization problem. Moreover, our algorithm is also formulated in a multi-scale framework. The performance of our method is demonstrated on a variety of real and synthetic images and compared with traditional techniques. Examples show that our method gives promising results.