Cairo University, Faculty of Computers & Information Information Technology Department 5 Ahmed Zewal St., Orman, Giza, office box# 12613 (email)
Preserving the content of historic handwritten manuscripts is important for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, digital libraries are rapidly expanding and thus facilitate to store this information directly in digital form. For digitising text documents, a crucial step is to binarise the captured images to separate the text from the background. In this paper, we propose an effective approach for binarisation of handwritten Arabic manuscripts which employs a whale optimisation algorithm, incorporating a fuzzy c-means objective function, to obtain optimal thresholds. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to earlier methods.