Shape suppression is used to identify areas of images that include particular shapes. According to one embodiment, a Vector Quantization (VQ)-based shape classifier is designed to identify the vertical edges of a set of shapes (e.g., English letters and numbers). A shape suppression filter is applied to the candidate areas, which are identified from a vertical edge map according to the edge density, to remove the vertical edges which are not classified as characteristic of shapes. Areas with high enough edge density after the filtering are identified as potential areas of the image that include one or more of the set of shapes.