1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: under the control of one or more computer systems configured with executable instructions, obtaining an image captured by a camera of a portable computing device; identifying a first region within the image potentially containing at least one character of text; determining that the first region has at least one of an amount of blur, a level of contrast, or an amount of noise that falls outside an acceptable range; performing at least one local image enhancement on the first region to improve text recognition within the first region for an optical character recognition (OCR) engine; and analyzing the first region with the OCR engine to attempt to recognize at least one text string in the image.