Image analysis – Color image processing – Image segmentation using color
Reexamination Certificate
1999-01-29
2001-12-04
Johnson, Timothy M. (Department: 2623)
Image analysis
Color image processing
Image segmentation using color
C382S176000, C382S177000, C382S292000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06327382
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the area discrimination or extraction of an input image. The present invention relates to the analysis of a color image. The present invention relates to preprocessing for optical character recognition.
2. Related Background Art
Due to the significantly improved processing performance of computers, documentation tools having a high power of expressions have been developed to facilitate the application of colored and diverse documents.
On the other hand, preprocessing for determining a target area for character recognition, that is, the area discriminating technique is gathering attention as an essential technique for conventional documentation tools, for example, OCRs. This is because the use of colored and diverse documents results in complicated layouts, thereby preventing textual areas from being extracted using a simple demarcating technique.
The above area discriminating technique, however, deals only with black-and-white binary images and does not directly cope with colored images. This also applies to general area discriminating techniques. Thus, no color information is reflected in area discrimination and the concept that colors are used as area attributes does not exist, so color information is totally neglected.
Thus, in view of the spread of colored documents and their complicated layouts, existing area discriminating techniques provide insufficient functions for preprocessing for documentation (text processing).
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention recursively retrieves uniform binary density areas to enable areas of the same background color to be extracted even from documents with a colored background or inverse characters. It also designates retrieving areas of a minimum size to avoid useless retrievals in order to achieve a sufficiently practical processing speed. Furthermore, this invention reliably discriminates a main object, represents it as binary data, and adds a color attribute to it to enable the accuracy of subsequent image conversions to be substantially improved. In particular, this invention enables the true character recognition of colored documents taking color information into account, thereby noticeably contributing to the efficient processing of complicated documents.
REFERENCES:
patent: 5949555 (1999-09-01), Sakai et al.
Kaneda Kitahiro
Yagasaki Toshiaki
Canon Kabushiki Kaisha
Fitzpatrick ,Cella, Harper & Scinto
Johnson Timothy M.
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