I am completely new to opencv and machine vision in general. My problem involves detecting objects in rasterized images of pdf documents. So these are essentially binary images. My question is will the object detection algorithms in opencv still work with binary images? I assume that image gradients play an important role in object detection algorithms, so if they do not exist in binary images then these algorithms might not work well. To be specific I am trying to be able to detect the following kinds objects from pdf raster images.
- Tables
- Images
- Textblocks
- Form fields, etc.
To do this my plan is to use the opencv cascade classifier for supervised object detection. If that fails I thought that another option would be to use opencv's line, rectangle, and text block detection along with some heuristics to identify some of these objects in an unsupervised way.
So in summary, I wish to know if this is a worthwhile direction to go in given that the images I am working with are binary.