See section 23.3 for tons of methods: http://iris.usc.edu/Vision-Notes/bibliography/contentschar.html#OCR,%20Document%20Analysis%20and%20Character%20Recognition%20Systems
Pick one and code it up in MATLAB. I gave one method today to someone: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/36890-image-scrambling-code-in-matlab It (the bitplane/LSB method) is probably one of the most simplest, weakest, most primitive methods out there though.
