There are two issues common to any approach at document layout analysis: noise and skew. Noise refers to image noise, such as salt and pepper noise or Gaussian noise. Skew refers to the fact that a document image may be rotated in a way so that the text lines are not perfectly horizontal. It is a common assumption in both document layout analysis algorithms and optical character recognition algorithms that the characters in the document image are oriented so that text lines are horizontal. Therefore, if there is skew present then it is important to rotate the document image so as to remove it.