SYSTEM FOR SEGMENTING LINE DRAWINGS FROM TEXT WITHIN A BINARY DIGITAL IMAGE

A system that identifies and discriminates between image regions that consist of text lines of alphanumeric characters and image regions that largely consist of non-alphanumeric line-drawing components. Only image components which are determined to be alphanumeric characters are submitted to an OCR program, thus saving processing time and avoiding errors. The system mainly exploits the principle that text blocks in an image are characterized by regularly spaced horizontal runs of white consistent with inter-line spaces.