Patent ID: 8600165

Claim:
A method for mark recognition in an image of an original document, comprising: a) receiving an image of an original document in which at least one designated field is provided for accepting a mark applied by a user; b) extracting a region of interest from the image which includes pixels, at least some of the pixels corresponding to the designated field; c) determining a center of gravity of the region of interest based on a distribution of black pixels in the region of interest; d) for each of a plurality of iterations: i) partitioning the region of interest into sub-regions of interest, based on the determined center of gravity, where at a subsequent one of the iterations, sub-regions generated at an immediately prior iteration serve as respective regions of interest; ii) for each of a plurality of the sub-regions of interest, extracting data from the sub-region of interest based on a distribution of black pixels in the sub-region of interest; e) generating a representation of the extracted region of interest based on the data extracted from the plurality of sub-regions of interest for at least one of the iterations; and f) based on the representation, assigning a mark recognition state to the region of interest.