1. A method for identifying text pixels in a document, wherein the document consists of text pixels and non-text pixels, comprising steps of: (a) creating a group of connected components, wherein each connected component consists of a set of pixels in the document that together form a potential candidate for recognition as character using an optical character recognition method; (b) calculating a plurality of characteristics of different types for each connected component, forming a plurality of groups of characteristics, each group of characteristics including a characteristic of a single type for each of the connected components; (c) computing statistics of each group of characteristics; (d) identifying outlier components as connected components whose computed characteristics are all outside a statistical range of the computed statistics for each group of characteristics; (e) removing the outlier components from the group of connected components; and (f) identifying text pixels by segmenting pixels in the group of connected components into a group of text pixels and a group of background pixels.