Vertical edge extraction and detection is an important step in the EMR recognition system because it affects the system’s accuracy and computation time. Hence, a new vertical edge detection algorithm (VEDA) is proposed here to reduce the computation time of the whole EMR detection method. This paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces a brief of related work. Section III describes two parts. The first part discusses in detail our proposed approach to vertical edge detection, i.e., using an unwanted-line elimination algorithm (ULEA) and the VEDA. The second part discusses the proposed EMR method. Experimental results and discussion are presented in Section IV. Section V draws our conclusions.