Patent ID: 7529407

Claim:
A method of segmenting an image of pixels into a number of fields corresponding to lay-out elements of the image, the pixels having a value representing an intensity and/or color of a picture element, the method comprising: using a processor to perform the steps of: constructing a graph having vertices and edges connecting the vertices, on the based of background areas in the image, said graph edges corresponding to field separators that together delineate the fields of the image; constructing a list of contiguous shortest cycles that together completely cover at least apart of the image, a shortest cycle being defined as a closed path from a vertex back to that same vertex via the edges of the graph, that has the lowest sum of weights of edge of all possible closed paths from said vertex tack to said vertex; and defining the shortest cycles of the list as the fields of the image, wherein said step of defining comprises: determining an enclosed area for each shortest cycle in the list of shortest cycles, and sorting the list of shortest cycles based on the size of the enclosed area, wherein any further processing of the image is performed successively on fields corresponding to the shortest cycles in the order of the sorted list.