A system and method of transmitting data frames between a plurality of input ports to a plurality of output ports is described. The input ports segment portions of the received data frames to provide smaller data cells which are individually transmitted to an output port associated with a destination of the segmented data frame. Based upon information provided in the data cells received at the output port, the output port determines the ordinal positions of the received data cells within the seg...

A method and apparatus is described that smoothes images within regions but not across boundaries. In one embodiment, a segmentation map is smoothed. Based on the color difference between pixels in an input frame and corresponding pixels in a background image, this segmentation map indicates the likelihood that each pixel in the input frame belongs to the foreground. The smoothed segmentation map may be processed further to reduce misclassification errors. Based on the segmentation map, the fore...

The present invention provides a facility for selecting from a sequence of natural language characters combinations of characters that may be words. The facility uses indications, for each of a plurality of characters, of (a) the characters that occur in the second position of words that begin with the character and (b) the positions in which the character occurs in words. For each of a plurality of contiguous combinations of characters occurring in the sequence, the facility determines whether ...

A system and method for method of cleaning segmentation tags is disclosed. A method in accordance with the present invention comprises receiving a plurality of segmentation tags; generating block level tags in response to the received segmentation tags wherein each block level tag is a representative tag for a block of received segmentation tags; and cleaning selected ones of the received segmentation tags using a window of neighboring block level tags.

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for classifying image data. A white class detector may receive input image data and determine a white class of a specified pixel based on local roughness, peak or count or valley count and a brightness. A pattern detection device may detect a pattern of pixels across a scan line or matrix of input data and compare the pattern with a plurality of predetermined pixel patterns.

A system 100 is capable of segmenting a connected text, such as Japanese or Chinese sentence, into words. The system includes means 110 for reading an input string representing the connected text. Segmentation means 120 identifies at least one word sequence in the connected text by building a tree structure representing word sequence(s) in the input string in an iterative manner. Initially the input string is taken as a working string. Each word of a dictionary 122 is compared with the beginning...

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for classifying image data. A video peak/valley counter may count peaks and valleys within a window of the input image data. The apparatus and method checks whether any peaks or valleys are located within a neighborhood of a pixel under consideration.

In a system and method for automatically segmenting a scanned document to separate areas containing different types of information such as black/white text or graphics, continuous tone pictures, and half-tone pictures, the document is divided into a number of subimages and the individual subimages are classified in an initial labeling phase. The initial label matrix thus obtained is relaxed in a subsequent step so that a pattern of uniformly labeled segments corresponding to the areas in the doc...

A method of document segmentation. Specifically, one embodiment of the present invention discloses a method of document segmentation that performs a plurality of projection profiles of pixel intensities on a document containing a plurality of text lines over a range of angles. A plurality of slope values for a plurality of discrete distances perpendicular to said range of angles is calculated for the plurality of projection profiles. A set of maximum absolute slope values is sorted out from the ...

A Chinese word segmentation apparatus relates to processing of a Chinese sentence input to a computer. A character-to-phonetic converter of the segmentation apparatus initially converts a Chinese sentence into a phonetic symbol string while referring to a character phonetic dictionary and a ductionary for characters with different pronunciations. Thereafter, a candidate word-selector refers to a system dictionary to retrieve all of the possible candidate characters or words in the phonetic symbo...