1. A computer-implemented method for layout independent recognition of an input document, the method comprising: receiving an electronic document as the input document; rendering the electronic document using a layout process to produce a layout independent document with a layout defined by the layout process; extracting an image patch from the layout independent document; segmenting the image patch into an input text strip; and locating from a plurality of stored pages a page with a matching text strip that matches the input text strip to produce a candidate page corresponding to the electronic document.