The above picture shows that global thresholding does not work very well for certain illumination/environment conditions. So we may need to find another idea.
As it was already mentioned, optical glyphs are quite contrast objects - black glyph surrounded by white area. Of course the contrast may change depending on light conditions and black areas may get lighter, but white areas may get darker. But still the difference should be considerable enough unless we have absolutely bad illumination. So instead of trying to find black or white quadrilaterals, we may try to find regions where image brightness changes sharply. This is the work for edge detector, for example Difference Edge Detector: