34 International Journal of Mobile Computing and Multimedia Communications, 4(3), 34-53, July-September 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Automatic Evaluation, Document Pre-Processing, Evaluation Metrics, Ground-Truth Generation, Next Generation Network Application INTRODUCTION The communication industry continues to improve the quality of its products. This im- provement is shown in the functional network architecture, that is, the physical architecture of the network elements, as well as in the interac- tion between different service domains. The first objective of the telecommunication operators was the improvement of the network infrastruc- ture. In the last few years, it has been proved that without new services, it is difficult to achieve success (Xu et al., 2011). The Next Generation Operation Support System (NGOSS) has been considered as a possible solution for service providers. Due to improvements in the next generation network, most applications have Collaborative Access to Ancient Documents: Towards a Distributed Comparison of Pre-Processing Approaches Ines Ben Messaoud Ben Arbia, École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Tunis, Tunisia Haikal El Abed, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany Volker Märgner, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany Hamid Amiri, École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Tunis, Tunisia ABSTRACT With the evolution of the next generation networks several applications have emerged to be used through the web. Applications allowing the analysis and the recognition of documents are emerged to be used through Internet. Document pre-processing output may affect the effciency of document analysis and recognition systems. In order to ameliorate the effciency of such systems, an objective evaluation of pre-processing steps is necessary. The authors propose a new framework for automatic evaluation of binarization approaches. The evaluation of binarization approaches is based on the comparison between binary images and their ground- truths. For that reason a method for the generation of ground-truth is proposed. This method is evaluated using the benchmarking dataset DIBCO 2009. The comparison between binarization methods’ results is based on several evaluation metrics as FM and PSNR. The proposed framework is tested on printed images (250 images) from the Google-Books collection and on handwritten images (60 images) from the IAM historical database. DOI: 10.4018/jmcmc.2012070103