METHOD FOR EXTRACTING CHARACTER AREA OF GRAY LEVEL IMAGE AND RECORDING MEDIUM HAVING RECORDED THE PROGRAM THEREON

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To improve precision in reading and recognizing characters by extracting and specifying only a part including a character from the image of a processing object so as to execute image processing and character collation only in a partial area. SOLUTION: Based on the density value of each divided partial area, a distributed quantity is calculated to judge the area to be a character block or a background block (S201). Each partial area is rotated to calculate a distribution value from the distribution of the projecting values of each direction to judge the area to be the character block or the background block (S202). Whether the partial area is the character block or the background block is totally judged by these discriminated result to finally establish the character area (S203). Only the character area is extracted by limiting to the partial area including a character specified from the image of the processing object. Otherwise, the shape of a character boundary where variation of density is steep is extracted (S204). Thus, character reading and recognition hardly influenced by density variation and a noise pattern existing in the background area of an original image.