Statistical zone finding

We propose a statistical technique of zone finding for the class of documents that art neither rigidly structured like tax forms nor very unstructured like magazine pages or engineering drawings. Given an initial window assumed to contain the final zone (bounding box) of interest, and a 'signature' of the target, we propose to locate the final zone by a combination of simple outside-in and inside-out searches based on the assumption that the coordinates of the target have unimodal distribution. Results are presented in the bank check domain, and the applicability of the technique to other domains is discussed. © 1996 IEEE.