Rulings are graphical primitives that are essential for document structure recognition. However in the case of ancient documents, bad printing techniques or bad conditions of conservation induce problems for their ecient recognition. Consequently, usual line segment extractors are not powerful enough to properly extract all the rulings of a heterogeneous document. In this paper, we propose a new method for ruling recognition, based on perceptive vision: we show that combining several levels of vision improves ruling recognition. Thus, it is possible to put forward hypothesis on the nature of the rulings at a given resolution, and to conrm or inrm their presence and nd their exact position at higher resolutions. We propose an original strategy of cooperation between resolutions and present tools to set up a correspondence between the elements extracted at each resolution. We validate this approach on images of ancient newspaper pages (dated between 1848 and 1944). We also propose to use the extracted rulings for the structure analysis of newspaper pages. We show that using more reliable extracted rulings simplies and improves document structure recognition.