A method for locating a structured field in a gray-scale image of an object, including choosing a plurality of anchor points in the image, each anchor point having a gray-scale value associated therewith. For each anchor point there is determined a horizontal variation dependent on a difference between the gray-scale value of the anchor point and the gray-scale value of a horizontally neighboring anchor point, and there is also determined a vertical variation dependent on a difference between the gray-scale value of the anchor point and the gray-scale value of a vertically neighboring anchor point. Those anchor points whose vertical and horizontal variations obey a first or a second predefined condition are defined as vertically or horizontally dominant respectively. One or more kernels are defined in the image, each such kernel comprising a group of anchor points n predetermined mutual proximity and satisfying a third predefined condition relating the number of vertically-dominant and horizontally-dominant anchor points in the group. The structured field in the image is located using one or more kernels.

A Custom Control Generator automatically generates custom controls for selected modules (i.e., externally-accessible functions or procedures) in a dynamic link library (DLL). The Custom Control Generator accepts as input the library itself, header files for the library, and a specified calling sequence of selected modules within the library. The Custom Control Generator then generates as output a shell program, wherein the shell program comprises source code for a user-interface for invoking the selected module in an interactive manner.

A method and system for preparing dialogue boxes that requires only simple coding and does not depend on the use of complicated procedures, such as the calculation of position coordinates. To eliminate the selection of display items that can be automatically assigned, items are selected from the top, and an "OK" button and a "CANCEL" button are assumed always to be present.

A computer method and apparatus determines keywords of documents. An initial document by term matrix is formed, each document being represented by a respective M dimensional vector, where M represents the number of terms or words in a predetermined domain of documents. The dimensionality of the initial matrix is reduced to form resultant vectors of the documents. The resultant vectors are then clustered such that correlated documents are grouped into respective clusters. For each cluster, the terms having greatest impact on the documents in that cluster are identified. The identified terms represent key words of each document in that cluster. Further, the identified terms form a cluster summary indicative of the documents in that cluster.

Analysis of selected aspects of behavior of an application computer program are studied by instrumenting the program in a manner that does not affect the program behavior. A separate analysis file, called a probe instance file, is created apart from the application being instrumented. Innocuous probes are placed at selected locations in the application program to monitor progress and performance of the program. The probes can be implemented by placing markup specifications in a separate part of the file and checking the markup specifications after execution of each instruction in the application program to see whether a probe location is encountered. If so, execution is halted temporarily, and an instance of the corresponding probe code is appended to the probe instance file. Preferably, the probe bodies, i.e. the probe instance file, is subsequently executed as a separate thread. The application therefore runs at full speed. The probe bodies can be simple C statements or any other set of instructions.