Automatic detection of italic, bold and all-capital words in document images

We propose simple and fast algorithms for detection of italic, bold and all-capital words without doing actual character recognition. We present a statistical study which reveals that the detection of such words may play a key role in automatic information retrieval from documents. Moreover, detection of italic words can be used to improve the recognition accuracy of a text recognition system. Considerable number of document images have been tested and our algorithms give accurate results on all the tested images, and the algorithms are very easy to implement.