A wire breakage detecting method, being a method of detecting breakage of wire bonded on a chip of an electronic component by image processing, includes the step of observing a point of the wire as a pixel of one color of binary images of black and white, observing while rotating plural pixels around the present observation pixel being observed in a specific direction, moving the observation point of the wire by detection of the pixel of the same color as said color of the binary images, moving the observation point continuously, and detecting breakage of wire by inversion of the moving direction of the observation point.

An apparatus for measuring a cutting line having a first end and a second end comprises a photographic device for photographing an image signal of the cutting line, and a processing device having a conversion function for converting the image signal of the cutting line into binary image data, first and second contour tracing functions, and a judging function. The first contour tracing function traces the contour of the cutting line from the first end to the second end of the cutting line based on the binary image data and outputs first contour tracing data corresponding to the contour of the cutting line. The second contour tracing function traces the contour of the cutting line from the second end to the first end of the cutting line based on the binary image data and outputs second contour tracing data corresponding to the contour of the cutting line. The judging function judges an abnormality in the traced contour of the cutting line by comparing the first contour tracing data to the second contour tracing data.

An object of the present invention is to generate a vector or data from inputted drawing data interactively by suppressing the input cost. When an unknown process occurs in the system during data processing, an inquiry to a user is generated in the case of interactive operation. However, when drawings are handled, the number of inquiries to a user increases and the system operability lowers inversely. The present invention executes the drawing recognition method by cooperation and and competition of a multi-agent on the basis of the basic property of a figure such as adjacent relation. When blurring or a problem portion such as in interruption part or a junction part appears during recognition of a drawing, the linkage relation of line paths is automatically decided by making the recognition agent adjacent to the problem portion cooperate and compete. An inquiry to a user is not made. By doing this, vector data is obtained. The input cost of figure information in a data base can be reduced remarkably.

A method of recognizing the effects of coarse pixel quantization on text represented via raster signals to enable automatic selection between fax and normal modes of optical character recognition. A processor executes instructions stored in a memory to trace the contours of connected components included within a sample image and to count the number of runs one, two, and three pixels in length along the contour. If the sample image includes few runs two pixels in lengths along the contours of its connected components as compared to the number of runs one and three pixels in length, then the sample image has undergone coarse pixel quantization and the processor selects fax mode optical character recognition.