Image processing method and apparatus and storage medium therefor

摘要

It is an object of the present invention to appropriately extract areas for character recognition from a color image. It is another object of the present invention to separate and extract characters from a background color in a color image if the background of the manuscript is not white and if the characters are printed in a portion having a color that is not commonly used all over the image. To achieve these objects, this invention binarizes an input color image in a plurality of stages and extracts area from binary images obtained in each stage to enable areas and text sections to be appropriately extracted despite the unknown colors of the characters and background contained in the input color image.