Patent ID: 7221795

Claim:
A document processing method for processing a character input document, said character input document including a character entry box having a central region and a peripheral region enclosing said central region, said peripheral region of said character entry box including a dot texture, said central region of said character entry box excluding said dot texture, said dot texture defining an array of dots, said array of dots including at least two parallel rows of dots aligned along a first direction, and at least two parallel rows of dots aligned along a second direction, said first direction not parallel to said second direction, and a title character drawn with the dot texture of a line formed of a set of dots arranged two dimensionally and having a width which includes a plurality of dots, comprising: an input step of inputting an image which includes (1) said character entry box drawn with said dot texture and (2) a written character and (3) said title character; a character detection step of removing entry-box data formed of the dot texture from the character and box data input in the input step either by prior deletion of each dot constituting the dot texture to that of character data in a contraction process or by removal of a linked component smaller than a predetermined threshold, to detect character data of the written character; a character-pattern removing step of removing the character data detected in the character detection step from the character and box data input in the input step according to the character and box data to generate the entry-box data; an expansion step of applying an expansion process to a pattern obtained in the character detection step, to an extent in which adjacent dots become linked; an entry-box detection step of integrating or accumulating the entry-box data obtained by removing the character data detected in the character detection step from the character and box data input in the input step, in the row direction or in the column direction to obtain a marginal distribution, and of obtaining entry-box-position data from the marginal distribution along a row or a column to detect the entry-box-position data which indicates a position where a character is to be written; a relating step of relating the character and the entry box to each other according to the character data detected in the character detection step and the entry-box-position data detected in the entry-box detection step to extract a character pattern for each character; and a recognition step of recognizing the title character in a title obtained in the expansion step in the image, and recognizing each written character according to each character pattern extracted in the relating step, and a storage step of storing the title character recognized by the recognition step, and storing each written character recognized by the recognition step by related to the character entry box.