Abstract: A method of determining unintended inclination in an image of characters that is to be processed by a device such as a copy machine, a facsimile machine, or an optical character recognition system. An image of characters is generated, and expansion is performed on this image the optimal number of times. The number of expansions is based on the differences in the area of the non-background portion of the image at various stages of expansion. Next, the major direction of inclination is determined for the image. The inclination angle of the image is then determined based on the inclination factors of the character lines for various zones in the image.