A system to recognize text or symbols contained in a captured image using machine learning models leverages context information about the image to improve accuracy. Contextual information is determined for the entire image, or spatial regions of the images, and is provided to a machine learning model when a determination is made as to whether a region does or does not contain text or symbols. Associating features related to the larger context with features extracted from regions potentially containing text or symbolic content provides an incremental improvement of results obtained using machine learning techniques.