I need to segment a scanned page to character zones.... something like identify the layouts of the page into text box and pictures.
The input of my program is a scanned page saved in bitmap format using a scanner, and my output must be a bitmap file of boxes
to show the text boxes.

In this lab, there is a bonus part for seperating the text boxes into lines.

I am quite new to bitmap processing, and I will be programming in C++ under UNIX.
Please help me if you know how do I decipher a bitmap?
How do we actually open a bitmap in the 1st place?
I have never open any file except ASCII files

Thanks