A local connectivity feature transform (LCFT) is applied to binary document images containing text characters, to generate transformed document images which are then input into a bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to perform character/word recognition. The LCFT transformed image is a gray scale image where the pixel values encode local pixel connectivity information of corresponding pixels in the original binary image. The transform is one that provides a unique transform score for every possible shape represented as a 3×3 block. In one example, the transform is computed using a 3×3 weight matrix that combines bit coding with a zigzag pattern to assign weights to each element of the 3×3 block, and by summing up the weights for the non-zero elements of the 3×3 block shape.