Word-to-word selection on images

A method of selecting a text region from an image, comprising:

• (a) performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to generate OCR results, the OCR results including text and formatting information for each word in the image;
• the formatting information including word bounding box, text line boundary, and text region boundary information;
• (b) determining an active region associated with each word in the image based on the OCR results;
• the active regions identifying regions in the image between word bounding boxes text line boundaries, and text region boundaries within text regions of the image;
• (c) identifying a first word and a last word in a selected text region based on at least one active region associated with at least one word within the selected text region;
• and
• (d) identifying all words within the selected text region based on the first and last words in the selected text region.

A method of selecting a text region from an image, comprising:

• (a) converting image data into coded text for each word in the image;
• (b) determining formatting information for each of the words in the image;
• the formatting information including word bounding box, text line boundary, and text region boundary information;
• (c) determining an active region associated with each word based on the formatting information, each active region representing a plurality of image coordinate points associated with one of the plurality of words;
• the active regions identifying regions in the image between word bounding boxes, text line boundaries, and text region boundaries within text regions of the image;
• (d) identifying a first image coordinate point designating a beginning of a selected text region and a second image coordinate point designating an end of the selected text region;
• (e) determining the active region corresponding to each of the first and second image coordinate points;
• (f) determining the word associated with each of the active regions corresponding to the first and second image coordinate points;
• and
• (g) identifying all the words within the selected text region.

An article of manufacture for selecting a text region from an image, the article of manufacture comprising computer usable media including computer readable instructions embedded therein that causes a computer to perform:

• (a) accessing from a memory device character and formatting information for each word in the image;
• the formatting information including word bounding box, text line boundary, and text region boundary information;
• (b) determining an active region associated with each of the words in the image based on the character information and formatting information for each of the words in the image;
• the active regions identifying regions in the image between word bounding boxes, text line boundaries, and text region boundaries within text regions of the image;
• (c) identifying a first word and a last word in a selected text region based on at least one active region associated with at least one of the words within the selected text region;
• and
• (d) identifying all words within the selected text region based on the first and last words in the selected text region.

An image processing system, comprising:

• a character recognition module that provides character information for each word in an image;
• a formatting module that provides formatting information for each of the words in the image;
• the formatting Information including word bounding box, text line boundary, and text region boundary information;
• an active region module that provides active region information associated with each of the words in the image based on the character information and the formatting information for each of the words;
• the active regions identifying regions in the image between word bounding boxes, text line boundaries, and text region boundaries of the image;
• a word selection module that provides word selection information indicating which words are included within a selected text region based on the active region information associated with at least one word with the selected text region;
• and
• an image generating module that produces an image of the selected text region based on the word selection information.