AUTOMATIC METHOD OF GENERATING THEMATIC SUMMARIES FROM A DOCUMENT IMAGE WITHOUT PERFORMING CHARACTER RECOGNITION

A method of automatically generating a thematic summary from a document image without performing character recognition to generate an ASCII representation of the document text. The method begins with decomposition of the document image into text blocks, and text lines. Using the median x-height of text blocks the main body of text is identified. Afterward, word image equivalence classes and sentence boundaries within the blocks of the main body of text are determined. The word image equivalence classes are used to identify thematic words. These, in turn are used to score the sentences within the main body of text, and the highest scoring sentences are selected for extraction.