Patent ID: 7039240

Claim:
A method for identifying a desirable path for document image decoding incorporating a Stack algorithm comprising: determining a first weight W 1 for a partial path, the partial path having a length, the first weight W 1 including a template matching component and a language model component; adjusting the first weight W 1 to a second weight W 2 according to a result of a previous iteration of the Stack algorithm; and queuing the partial path in a priority queue according to the second weight W 2 of the partial path to identify a desirable oath for document image decoding, wherein adjusting the first weight W 1 to the second weight W 2 comprises determining the second weight W 2 as: W 2 =W 1 −W e, where W e is an estimated weight that is based on the length of the partial path and the weights of paths computed in a previous iterations of the Stack algorithm.