44. A title extracting apparatus for recognizing and extracting a required partial region from a document image of a document that has been converted into image data, comprising: character region generating means for generating character regions, including black pixel connected regions composed of connected black pixels of the document image; character string region generating means for unifying one or more character regions generated by said character region generating means, and for generating character string regions including one or more character regions; and title extracting means for extracting a particular character string region of the character string regions, according to attributes, corresponding to the black pixel connected regions, of a plurality of character string regions generated by said character string region generating means, as a title region, wherein said character region generating means is adapted for obtaining circumscribed rectangles of the black pixel connected regions as the character regions, and wherein said character string region generating means is adapted for generating a first histogram that represents a distribution of the circumscribed rectangles in a first direction using a first side of each of the circumscribed rectangles, obtaining groups of the circumscribed rectangles from a shape of the first histogram, and processing each of the groups.
45. The title extracting apparatus as set forth in claim 44, wherein said character string region generating means is adapted for generating a second histogram that has a shape, and that represents a distribution of the circumscribed rectangles in a second direction using the second side of each of the circumscribed rectangles, obtaining groups of the circumscribed rectangles from the shapes of the first histogram and the second histogram, and processing each of the groups.