APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR USE IN IMAGE PROCESSING

Optical character recognition is achieved by a system which comprises a scanner for scanning a document, an edge extractor for identifying edges in the image produced by the scanner to produce an outline of each object identified in the image, a segmentation facility for grouping the object outlines into blocks, means for identifying features of the outlines, and a final classification stage for providing data in an appropriate format representative of the characters in the image. Also disclosed are a novel edge extractor, a novel page segmentation facility and a novel feature extraction facility.