DR-Mamba: Automatic Inference-Time Domain Adaptation for Document Image Binarization via Sample-Conditioned Detail-Background Suppression
About
Degraded document image binarization is sensitive to domain shifts caused by paper aging, bleed-through, stains, shadows, and uneven illumination, and the foreground-background separation of recent learning-based methods can become unstable on unseen degradation domains. We propose DR-Mamba, a sample-conditioned detail-background suppression framework that performs automatic inference-time domain adaptation for document image binarization. Unlike test-time adaptation methods that require gradient updates or auxiliary data at inference, DR-Mamba adapts to each input document through input-dependent gates within a single forward pass, requiring no target-domain labels, no fine-tuning, and no test-time parameter updates. Instead of using Mamba-style selective scanning as a single generic feature path, DR-Mamba reinterprets it as fast-slow route modeling: a fast detail route captures local stroke structures, while a slow background route accumulates spatially persistent degradation responses. The two routes are integrated through an input-dependent subtractive gate that explicitly suppresses background interference rather than fusing features by addition or concatenation. We further add full-resolution detail-guided reconstruction and thin-stroke-aware supervision to recover fine strokes lost during downsampling. Evaluated under a leave-one-year-out protocol on DIBCO-style benchmarks, where each held-out year is treated as an unseen degradation domain, DR-Mamba shows that per-document, per-location subtractive suppression improves cross-domain robustness, with particularly strong performance on the most severely degraded held-out fold.