The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Feb. 02, 2016
Filed:
Aug. 29, 2014
Konica Minolta Laboratory U.s.a., Inc., San Mateo, CA (US);
Yibin Tian, Menlo Park, CA (US);
KONICA MINOLTA LABORATORY U.S.A., INC., San Mateo, CA (US);
Abstract
A simple, fast, and effective method is provided for background removal for document images with dark text over relatively uniform or slow-varying non-white background. Candidate regions for background removal are first identified by binarizing the input gray-scale image using a global threshold very close to white. Large contours in the binarized image are identified as candidate regions. A histogram analysis is applied to preliminarily identify regions containing graphics, which are excluded from further processing. The remaining candidate regions are individually binarized. The binarized regions are analyzed to determine whether they contain graphics or text/table, by examining their geometric characteristics and statistics of connected components within them. For candidate regions determined to contain text or tables, background pixels in the input image are set to white using a mask which is the inverse of the individually binarized images of the regions. Regions that contain graphics are left unchanged.