Abstract: A system and method for capturing and digitally representing hand-drawn annotations from non-digital media such as paper or a whiteboard. The system and method involve taking an image of the annotations and then processing the image to determine the shapes defined by spatially connected pixels. These shapes can then be treated (eg. selected, resized, moved, copied, deleted, etc.) as atomic units and used in a document editing or digital communication setting. This system does not require any pre-defined set of characters, symbols, or shapes.