Patent Document ID: 7873228
Application ID: 11359199

Base Claim:
1. A method, comprising: identifying a scanned image of a ligature within a scanned document, the ligature including two or more touching characters; forming a ligature cluster from a number of scanned images similar to the scanned image of the ligature; identifying that the number of the scanned images forming the ligature cluster falls below a threshold; and based on the identifying that the number of the scanned images forming the ligature cluster falls below the threshold: comparing a plurality of prototypes to the two or more touching characters of the ligature to identify two or more matched prototypes, and creating a synthetic ligature, by a processor, based on the two or more matched prototypes, the synthetic ligature being used to reconstruct the scanned document.

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Claim 12:
12. The method of claim 1 , wherein comparing the plurality of prototypes to the two or more touching characters of the ligature to identify two or more matched prototypes further comprises: overlaying a prototype of the plurality of prototypes onto a first character of the two or more characters of the synthetic ligature; and examining, pixel by pixel, respective pixels of the prototype and the first character of the ligature.