Patent ID: 8532374

Claim:
A method of classifying regions of a scanned document image, said method comprising the steps of: (a) partitioning the scanned image into a plurality of tiles; (b) determining at least one dominant colour for each of the plurality of tiles; (c) generating superpositioned regions based on the dominant colours, each said superpositioned region representing a group of tiles, wherein at least one tile is grouped into two superpositioned regions and each dominant colour is represented by at most one of the superpositioned regions, and wherein the generation of superposition regions comprises: (ca) converting each of the tiles into a representation having a plurality of layers, the representation corresponding to at least one said tiles comprising multiple coloured layers, each said tile comprising a superposition of the corresponding said coloured layers; and (cb) merging, for each of said coloured layers, adjacent ones of said tiles, thereby generating the superpositioned regions and a multi-layered document representation of the document; (d) calculating statistics for each said superpositioned region using pixel level statistics from each of the tiles included in said superpositioned region; and (e) determining a classification for each superpositioned region based on the calculated statistics.