Patent ID: 8645819

Claim:
A method for detecting images in an electronic document comprising: receiving an electronic document comprising a plurality of pages; for each of at least one of the pages of the document: identifying elements of the page, comprising identifying a set of graphical elements and identifying a separate set of text elements; providing for identifying and excluding, from the set of graphical elements, graphical elements which serve as graphical page constructs, including, for a set of pages of the document, identifying positions in the document pages where graphical elements have a higher similarity than in other positions of the document pages, and identifying graphical elements at those positions as graphical page constructs; segmenting the page, based on remaining graphical elements in the set of graphical elements to generate a set of image blocks, each of the image blocks comprising at least one of the graphical elements; computing whether a text element from the set of text elements of the page is associated with a respective image block in the set of image blocks of the page; forming candidate images, each candidate image comprising an image block and, for a text element from the set of text elements which is determined to be associated with a respective image block, a respective one of the candidate images further including the associated text element; and for a pair of the candidate images which are determined to be overlapping, grouping the pair of overlapping candidate images to form a new image.