A method and system of identifying a plurality of strings in an image are described. A set of ranks and an image are received. Optical character recognition is performed on the image to identify candidate strings. The candidate strings are ordered according to their location in the image with respect to a reading direction. Minimum assignation costs between the plurality of candidate strings and the set of ranks are determined. Each of the minimum assignation costs is representative of a cost of one or more edit operations performed on the plurality of candidate strings to obtain a subset of candidate strings ordered according to the set of ranks. A subset of candidate strings that is associated with the lowest minimum assignation cost when compared with other minimum assignation costs of other subsets of candidate strings from the plurality of candidate strings is selected and outputting.