A “Text Rectifier” provides various techniques for processing selected regions of an image containing text or characters by treating those images as matrices of low-rank textures and using a rank minimization technique that recovers and removes image deformations (e.g., affine and projective transforms as well as general classes of nonlinear transforms) while rectifying the text or characters in the image region. Once distortions have been removed and the text or characters rectified, the resulting text is made available for a variety of uses or further processing such as optical character recognition (OCR). In various embodiments, binarization and/or inversion techniques are applied to the selected image regions during the rank minimization process to both improve text rectification and to present the resulting images of text to an OCR engine in a form that enhances the accuracy of the OCR results.