3. The method of claim 2 further including: analyzing the edge trace image to identify spurious edge traces that are unlikely to correspond to the warped textual lines; removing any identified spurious edge traces from the edge trace image; and designating the remaining edge traces to be text line traces.
4. The method of claim 3 wherein the spurious edge traces are identified by determining a vertical separation distance between each edge pixel in the edge trace image and the nearest neighboring edge pixel in the vertical direction, and designating any edge pixels where the determined vertical separation distance falls outside of a predefined range to belong to a spurious edge trace.