An electronic device and method use a camera to capture an image of an environment outside followed by identification of regions therein. A subset of the regions is selected, based on attributes of the regions, such as aspect ratio, height, and variance in stroke width. Next, a number of angles that are candidates for use as skew of the image are determined (e.g. one angle is selected for each region. based on peakiness of a histogram of the region, evaluated at different angles). Then, an angle that is most common among these candidates is identified as the angle of skew of the image. The just-described identification of skew angle is performed prior to classification of any region as text or non-text. After skew identification, at least all regions in the subset are rotated by negative of the skew angle, to obtain skew-corrected regions for use in optical character recognition.