Performance Evaluation of Frequency Transform Based Block Classification of Compound Image Segmentation Techniques

Compound image segmentation plays a vital role in the compression of computer screen images. Computer screen images are images which are mixed with textual, graphical, or pictorial contents. In this paper, we present a comparison of two transform based block classification of compound images based on metrics like speed of classification, precision and recall rate. Block based classification approaches normally divide the compound images into fixed size blocks of non-overlapping in nature. Then frequency transform like Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are applied over each block. Mean and standard deviation are computed for each 8 × 8 block and are used as features set to classify the compound images into text/graphics and picture/background block. The classification accuracy of block classification based segmentation techniques are measured by evaluation metrics like precision and recall rate. Compound images of smooth background and complex background images containing text of varying size, colour and orientation are considered for testing. Experimental evidence shows that the DWT based segmentation provides significant improvement in recall rate and precision rate approximately 2.3% than DCT based segmentation with an increase in block classification time for both smooth and complex background images. © 2017, The Institution of Engineers (India).