Patent ID: 6993185

Claim:
A method for segmenting a digitized document into regions of halftone and text, comprising the steps of: generating an intensity image of said digitized document; identifying a texture of said digitized document by performing a windowing operation on said intensity image, said windowing operation comprising the additional steps of: generating a mask corresponding to said intensity image consisting of bits having a first state, moving a window of predetermined dimensions across said intensity image, for each window position, calculating a maximum intensity value and a minimum intensity value of an area of said intensity image corresponding to said window and converting all bits within an area of said mask corresponding to said window position to a second state if the difference between said maximum intensity value and said minimum intensity value is less than a predetermined value, and generating a modified intensity image by applying said mask to said intensity image; identifying bounding boxes within said digitized document representing regions of either halftone or text based upon said texture of said digitized document; and classifying said regions within said bounding boxes as either halftone or text.