Image processing method and apparatus

An image processing apparatus, comprising:

• a first scale binary image generating section configured to generate a first scale binary image from an image, wherein the first scale is smaller than the original scale of the image;
• a text line detecting section configured to detect at least one text line in the image based on the first scale binary image;
• a second scale binary image generating section configured to generate a second scale binary image from the image, wherein the second scale is larger than the first scale;
• a noise removing section configured to, for each text line, calculate a similarity between a corresponding section in the first scale binary image and a corresponding section in the second scale binary image, and remove the text line for which the similarity is lower than a predetermined level as noise;
• an optical character recognition section configured to, for one or more of the remaining text line, perform optical character recognition on corresponding section(s) in the second scale binary image to determine character orientation(s) of the corresponding text line(s);
• and
• an image orientation determining section configured to determine the orientation of the image according to the character orientation(s).