PURPOSE: To decide exactly the result of recognition, and to improve a processing speed, by converting contents written on a form at each field to a category, registering in advance a word belonging to the category, and retrieving the word at every category.

CONSTITUTION: Information on the form is scanned and read by an optical scanning part 1, and its picture information is binary-coded and stored in a picture storage part 2. Information from this storage part 2 is provided to a recognizing part 3, the format information of a format informaion part 4 is referred to select corresponding plural candidate character. The format information regarding each field on the form, and category designating information are stored in this information part 4. The word group belonging to the category designated by this information part 4 is selected from a category storage part 7 by a category selecting means 5. Subsequently, the word group belonging to the selected category is retrieved by retrieving and a decision means 6, the result of recognition is decided from among plural candidate characters extracted by the recognizing part 3, and the result of recognition is outputted from an output means 8.