6. The method of claim 3 wherein horizontally shrinking the vertically and horizontally expanded white space seeds terminate when the width falls below the threshold width.
3. The method of claim 2 wherein identifying the white space regions includes: selecting one or more rectangular white space candidate seeds that are candidate white space regions, said white space candidate seeds being located in inter-word spaces between neighboring, vertically overlapping word bounding boxes and having a width greater than a threshold width; vertically expanding each white space candidate seed by a configurable amount; selecting expanded white space candidate seeds that do not intersect any word bounding boxes as white space seeds; horizontally expanding the white space seeds without overlapping any word bounding boxes; and vertically expanding the horizontally expanded white space seeds while horizontally shrinking any vertically and horizontally expanded white space seeds to prevent overlap with any word bounding boxes.