Image processing for OCR with leptonica (inverse color text)

Question

I am trying to process the following image with leptonica to extract text with tesseract.

Original Image:

Tesseract on the original image yields this:

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Not great, especially the top background. So using leptionica I use a background removal algorithm (blur, difference, threshold, invert) to get the following image:

But tesseract doesn't do a good job with it:

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The main problem, it seems, is that now all of the text is outlined instead of solid. How can I adjust my algorithm or what can I add to made the text solid?

Answer 1

It seems that this paper proposes a binarization method which solves your problem:

T Kasar, J Kumar and A G Ramakrishnan. Font and Background Color Independent Text Binarization. (2007)