Fixed image thresholds can degrade OCR accuracy by erasing light text

A developer tested a common OCR preprocessing step that applies a fixed threshold to binarize images. This method can delete text lighter than the cutoff and turn unevenly lit regions completely black, leading to missing characters without triggering an error. Testing on web page screenshots and document templates showed significant accuracy drops, with character error rates rising dramatically under fixed thresholds. Adaptive thresholding and analyzing ink darkness and background brightness before processing produced far better results.
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