A feature called "stroke index" is introduced for document image analysis. It is based on the minimum covering run (MCR) expression method is introduced. This stroke index is a function of the number of horizontal and vertical runs in the original image and of number of runs by the MCR expression. As document images may present a variety of patterns such as graph, text, picture, or dithered image, it is necessary for image understanding to classify these different patterns into categories beforehand. It is shown how one could use this stroke index for such applications as classification or segmentation. This paper also gives an insight into the possibility of stroke extraction from document images, in addition to classifying different patterns in a compound image. >
