IMAGE PROCESSING SYSTEM WITH AUTOMATIC IMAGE CROPPING AND SKEW CORRECTION

A system and method is described for automatically determining in a scanned document image the presence of unwanted extraneous information caused by an extraneous device and scanner background information. Once the presence of this information is determined, the system and method of the present invention can compute, for instance, skew and crop statistics. From this, the image can be automatically deskewed and cropped appropriately without the background and extraneous information. The system and method accomplishes this by first determining the presence of unwanted extraneous and background information and then appropriately processing the document image. The extraneous information is ignored during deskew and crop computations. Also, the scanner background and the extraneous information are prevented from being included in the final digital representation of the image.