Document analysis systems and processes

A knowledge-based document analysis system and process for identifying and decomposing constrained and unconstrained images of scanned documents (100) is disclosed. Low level features are extracted by a document feature extractor (105) within bitonal and grayscale images. Low level features are passed to a document classification means (115) which forms initial hypotheses about the document class. For constrained documents, a document analysis means (125) sorts through various models to determine the exact type of document and then extracts the relevant fields for character recognition. For unconstrained documents, through the use of a blackboard architecture which includes a knowledge database and knowledge sources, the document analysis means (125) creates information and hypotheses to identify and locate relevant fields within the document. These fields are then sent for optical character recognition.