Systems, computer program products, and techniques for discriminating hand and machine print from each other, and from signatures, are disclosed and include determining a color depth of an image, the color depth corresponding to at least one of grayscale, bi-tonal and color; reducing color depth of non-bi-tonal images to generate a bi-tonal representation of the image; identifying a set of one or more graphical line candidates in either the bi-tonal image or the bi-tonal representation, the graphical line candidates including one or more of true graphical lines and false positives; discriminating any of the true graphical lines from any of the false positives; removing the true graphical lines from the bi-tonal image or the bi-tonal representation without removing the false positives to generate a component map comprising connected components and excluding graphical lines; and identifying one or more of the connected components in the component map.