Patent ID: 8045229

Claim:
An image processing method comprising: an extraction step of extracting areas having predetermined attributes from image data of a document; a calculation step of calculating skew angles of the areas extracted in the extraction step; a determination step of determining, as a necessary element, an area of the areas having a skew angle less than a threshold, and determining, as an unnecessary element, an area of the areas having a skew angle equal to or more than the threshold; a selection step of selecting an area determined as a necessary element among the areas; and a processing step of storing the area selected in said selection step in a memory as format data of a registered form, wherein the format data of the registered form is used for a form identification processing, and in the form identification processing, the registered form having format data most similar to format data of a query form is identified by comparing the format data of the query form with the format data of the registered form stored in the memory.