A text recognition server is configured to recognize text in a sparse text image. Specifically, given an image, the server specifies a plurality of “patches” (blocks of pixels within the image). The system applies a text detection algorithm to the patches to determine a number of the patches that contain text. This application of the text detection algorithm is used both to estimate the orientation of the image and to determine whether the image is textually sparse or textually dense. If the image is determined to be textually sparse, textual patches are identified and grouped into text regions, each of which is then separately processed by an OCR algorithm, and the recognized text for each region is combined into a result for the image as a whole.