10. The method of claim 8 , wherein the step of performing a threshold selection on the word segmentation hypotheses further uses automatically generated over and under segmentation training data.
11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the over and under segmentation training data is obtained by performing the steps of: providing a collection of training documents containing text line and word information; computing estimates of average intra-word and inter-word distances; generating over-segmented text lines by merging neighboring connected components closer than given first threshold percentage of the average intra-word distance; generating over-segmented text lines by merging neighboring connected components closer than given second threshold percentage of the average inter-word distance.