PURPOSE: To make recognition of a character pattern efficient and high accurate by utilizing a correlation of characteristic quantity of a direction, the number and length of a character stroke and a character pattern of said stroke.
CONSTITUTION: A directional code giving part 11 reads out sequentially a character pattern area in a memory 10 in the horizontal direction, and judged whether or not an aimed point of the character pattern belongs to a black point string which continues more than a reference length N to decide a directional code in all directions. If the belongs to a black point string having more than N- number of picture elements, mating directional codes are given for the aimed point. If directional codes given by for an aimed point (a) on the 1st line the directional code giving part 11 are the same as those of points (b), (c), (d) and (e) on the 1st and (i-1)th lines at least, a stroke extracting part 12 gives the stroke number to which said point belongs, and if they are different from those of points (b), (c), (d) and (e), the new stroke number is given for the aimed point. A recognition part 15 recognizes character in accordance with characteristic quantity to belong to a subpattern area at every directional code obtained by a characteristic quantity calculating part 14.
YOKOE TOORU
TAKENOUCHI MARIKO
