It really depends on the application. If the illumination is consistent, such as in many machine vision tasks, traditional thresholding is often the better choice. It’s straightforward, debuggable, and produces consistent, predictable results. On the other hand, in more complex and unpredictable scenes with variable lighting, textures, or object sizes, AI-based thresholding can perform better.
That said, I still prefer traditional thresholding in controlled environments because the algorithm is understandable and transparent.
Debugging issues in AI systems can be challenging due to their "black box" nature. If the AI fails, you might need to analyze the model, adjust training data, or retrain — a process that is neither simple nor guaranteed to succeed. Traditional methods, however, allow for more direct tuning and certainty in their behavior. For consistent, explainable results in controlled settings, they are often the better option.
It indeed would be much better.
There’s a reason the old CV methods aren’t used much anymore.
If you want to anything even moderately complex, deep learning is the only game in town.
sure, if you don't mind it hallucinating different numbers into your image
Right, but the non-deep learning OCR methods also do that. And they have a much much lower overall accuracy.
There’s a reason deep learning took over computer vision.
GP is talking about thresholding and thresholding is used in more than just OCR. Thresholding algorithms do not hallucinate numbers.