In certain implementations consistent with the present invention, a method of detecting text in a television video display table involves saving a frame of video to a memory device; determining that the frame of video contains a table having cells containing text; storing a working copy of the frame of video to a memory; isolating text in the table by: removing any table boundaries from the image; removing any cell boundaries from the image; determining if the image has three dimensional or shadow attributes and removing any three dimensional or shadow attributes identified; thereby producing text isolated against a contrasting color background; and processing the isolated text using an optical character recognition (OCR) engine to extract the text as data. This abstract is not to be considered limiting, since other embodiments may deviate from the features described in this abstract.