The motivation behind most of the applications of off-line text recognition is to convert data from conventional media into electronic media. Such applications include cheques, security documents and form processing. A document analysis system is presented to transfer grey-level composite documents with complex backgrounds, watermarks and poor illumination into electronic format that is suitable for efficient storage, retrieval and interpretation. The preprocessing phase for the document analysis system requires the conversion of a paper-based document to a digital bit-map representation...