1. A method for use in an optical character recognition process, the method for detecting textual lines in an input comprising a de-skewed gray scale image of a document, the method comprising the steps of: applying an edge detection operator to detect edges in the image to generate an edge space; identifying one or more connected components from the edge space; building one or more native line candidates from the connected components through application of central line tracing; and classifying the one or more native line candidates using binary classification as either textual or non-textual by examining the one or more native line candidates for embedded regularity in the edge space.