Sharp Corporation

Ezel Inc.

Seido Kawanaka

Hideo Takemura

Shiro Ida

Hiroyoshi Naito

Mituo Yoshikawa

Kouji Kumetani

A method of determining unintended inclination in an image of characters that is to be processed by a device such as a copy machine, a facsimile machine, or an optical character recognition system. An image of characters is generated, and expansion is performed on this image the optimal number of times. The number of expansions is based on the differences in the area of the non-background portion of the image at various stages of expansion. Next, the major direction of inclination is determined for the image. The inclination angle of the image is then determined based on the inclination factors of the character lines for various zones in the image.

Method for detecting inclination of an image of characters

The present invention relates to a method for discriminating between figure areas, e.g., half-tone photographs, drawings and the like, and text areas in an image. More specifically, an image is processed to determine the difference between maximum and minimum brightnesses in convolutions thereof. When the difference between the maximum and minimum brightnesses is less than or equal to a predetermined level, the center pixel in the convolution is determined to be a half-tone pixel. A half-tone area is detected by determining areas of the image having at least a predetermined number of half-tone pixels. In another aspect of the invention, contiguous areas of the image having fewer than a predetermined number of configuration pixels are determined to be vacant areas having neither figure nor character information.

Method for discriminating between figure and text areas of an image

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Osaka, Japan

Seido Kawanaka