Method and computer program product for recognizing italicized text

A computer program product implemented on a computer readable medium and operative in a data processing system for detecting italicized text comprising:

• an image acquisition portion capable of creating a plurality of digital characters of alphanumeric images from a block of text, each comprising a plurality of rows of digital pixels;
• a preprocessing portion that preprocesses the digital images such that each image is normalized to equal size and the pixels within each image have a first value or a second value;
• and
• a preclassification portion that determines the position of the left-most pixel with a first value in each row for each image, records the position of each left-most pixel with a first value as a ordered pair including the row number and ordinal position within the row, calculates a best-fit line with a corresponding slope for the ordered pairs through linear regression, and compares the calculated slope to a predetermined threshold so as to determine if the block of text comprises italicized text.