Table field separable device and table field separable manner

摘要

PURPOSE:To extract a whole table are including characters in a table as well by extracting line segments, which are the elements of the table, by extracting long black picture element strings, detecting the coordinates of starting points and ending points in the respective line segments, determining the diagonal coordinates of a rectangle expressing the table area from those coordinates and extracting the table area according to the diagonal coordinates. CONSTITUTION:A picture input means 1 is provided to digitize and input a picture including the table and a first image memory 2 is provided to store the input picture. Then, a line segment extracting means 3 is provided to extract the black picture element strings to be continued for more than a fixed threshold value, which is determined in advance in horizontal and vertical direction, and a second image memory 4 is provided to store the extracted black picture element string. A rectangle coordinate detecting means 5 is provided to detect the coordinates of the rectangle, which expresses the table area, based on the black picture element string stored in the second image memory 4 and a table area extracting means 6 is provided to extract the table area from the first image memory 2 according to the detected coordinates of the rectangle expressing the table area. Thus, document picture recognition or document edition can be efficiently executed and the table are including the characters as well can be extracted.