Patent Document ID: 8763038
Application ID: 12321856

Base Claim:
1. A method of detecting text in a television video display table, comprising: saving a frame of video representing an image to a memory device; determining that the frame of video contains a table having cells containing text; storing a working copy of the frame of video to a memory; isolating text in the table by: removing any table boundaries from the image; removing any cell boundaries from the image; determining if the image has three dimensional or shadow attributes in the table boundaries or cell boundaries and removing any three dimensional or shadow attributes identified, wherein determining if the image has three dimensional or shadow attributes in the table boundaries or cell boundaries is carried out by finding line patterns adjacent and outside table or cell boundaries that track a table or cell boundary; where determining if a cell has three dimensional or shadow attributes is carried out by subtracting a variable rectangular band of pixels from other cell values to see what size band maximizes cancellation in order to distinguish the cell from the text area; thereby producing text isolated against a contrasting color background; and processing the isolated text using an optical character recognition (OCR) engine to extract the text as data.

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Claim 3:
3. The method according to claim 1 , wherein determining that the frame of video contains a table having cells containing text is carried out by tracking remote control commands transmitted from a remote control to identify commands that result in display of a table having cells containing text.