1. A method for estimating the background portion of a document, comprising the steps of: obtaining a digital representation of the document, the digital representation comprising a two-dimensional array of elements, the color of each of which is specified by a combination of color component values; delineating clusters of pixels in a multimodal space of selected image features; assigning an initial label to each pixel to identify the closest feature mode in the multimodal feature space, the initial labels defining an initial label set; grouping like-labeled pixels into respective regions based on adjacency and distance in feature space; organizing the regions in a selected format representing region adjacency and spatial location; and refining the organization of the regions in the selected format to obtain a reduced set of labels.