Patent ID: 8453045

Claim:
A document conversion apparatus for converting document image data including a plurality of pages to an electronic document of a predetermined format, said document conversion apparatus comprising a processor programmed to execute: a character region extraction task that extracts partial images of character regions from one page of the document image data to be processed; a character recognition task that performs character recognition on the partial images extracted by the character region extraction task; a storing task that stores at least one of the partial images extracted by the character region extraction task and a result of the character recognition performed by the character recognition task into a storage, wherein the stored partial image and the stored result of the character recognition are data necessary to generate predetermined page data of the electronic document; a data conversion task that converts the one page of the document image data to be processed into page data of the electronic document of the predetermined format; a first transmission task that starts to transmit the page data corresponding to the one page of the document image data converted by the data conversion task to an information processing apparatus at the time when at least the character region extraction task and the data conversion task have been executed for the one page of the document image data, wherein the information processing apparatus is different from the document conversion apparatus; a generation task that generates the predetermined page data of the electronic document based on the stored partial images and the stored result of the character recognition after all pages of the document image data are processed in order by the character region extraction task, the character recognition task, the storing task, the data conversion task, and the first transmission task; and a second transmission task that transmits the predetermined page data generated by the generation task to the information processing apparatus, wherein the predetermined page data transmitted by the second transmission task is combined with all of the page data transmitted by the first transmission task at the information processing apparatus to obtain the electronic document of the predetermined format.