Stamps extraction using local adaptive k- means and ISODATA algorithms

Abstract

One of the main difficulties facing the certified documents documentary archiving system is checking the stamps system, but, that stamps may be contains complex background and surrounded by unwanted data. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to isolate background and to remove noise that may be surrounded stamp. Our proposed method comprises of four phases, firstly, we apply k-means algorithm for clustering stamp image into a number of clusters and merged them using ISODATA algorithm. Secondly, we compute mean and standard deviation for each remaining cluster to isolate background cluster from stamp cluster. Thirdly, a region growing algorithm is applied to segment the image and then choosing the connected region to produce a binary mask for the stamp area. Finally, the binary mask is combined with the original image to extract the stamp regions. The results indicate that the number of clusters can be determined dynamically and the largest cluster that has minimum standard deviation (i.e., always the largest cluster is the background cluster). Also, show that the binary mask can be established from more than one segment to cover are all stamp’s disconnected pieces and it can be useful to remove the noise appear with stamp region.