UNIVERSAL CHARACTER SEGMENTATION SCHEME FOR MULTIFONT OCR IMAGES

The method comprises: selecting an examination window whose size covers the image data associated with a character within a set of characters; presenting image data for a known character to the examining window to obtain a probability density function (PDF) for each pixel within the examining window for each character in the set of characters to be found or segmented to generate a composite PDF for each pixel within the examining window; and using the composite PDF to determine when the examining window is positioned over image data associated with a character within the character set.