Patent ID: 7305612

Claim:
A method for processing electronic documents, comprising the steps of: receiving as input an electronic document, wherein the electronic document is a PDF (portable document format) file and wherein at least a portion of the electronic document is raster-based; extracting form information from text portions and non-text portions of the electronic document, the form information including form lines and table boxes extracted from raster-based data; and generating a structured document for the electronic document, wherein the structured document represents the extracted form information of the text portions and the extracted form information of the non-text portions in a well-defined, hierarchical structure based on a predefined document type definition, wherein the step of extracting form information comprises the steps of: segmenting text portions and non-text portions; separately processing the text portions and non-text portions to extract associated form information; and combining the extracted form information of the text portions and non-text portions, and wherein the step of separately processing the non-text portions comprises the steps of: extracting images and location information for the images; converting grayscale and color extracted images to black and white images; determining horizontal and vertical lines in the extracted images; and determining table entries and form fields in the extracted images using the horizontal and vertical lines.