Patent ID: 7400768

Claim:
A method for improving optical recognition of text in an electronic bitmap including non-white pixels and white pixels through preprocessing of the bitmap in a computer, the method comprising: a) receiving the bitmap; b) locating one or more bytes having no non-white pixels in the received bitmap, wherein the locating identifies at least one gap in a character stroke; c) inserting bytes having non-white pixels into a series of bytes having no non-white pixels; d) optically recognizing the bitmap for a predefined class of text characters; e) establishing a layout of the bitmap as a matrix of bytes, the matrix having columns and rows; f) identifying a series of bytes along the column having no non-white pixels; g) counting the number of bytes in the series of bytes; h) determining whether the number exceeds a predefined maximum value; and i) replacing each of the series of bytes with one of the bytes bounding the series of bytes when the predefined maximum value is not exceeded.