PURPOSE: To recognize the character at a high speed by a small storage capacity by dividing a circumscribed rectangle of a character image into prescribed sized, setting a relation of a parting line and a character segment as a feature of a character and executing a character recognition.

CONSTITUTION: By a character segmenting means, a character area is extracted, and its circumscribed rectangle 140 is extracted. Subsequently, the circumscribed rectangle 140 is divided into prescribed numbers. For instance, with regard to parting lines 101-104 obtained by dividing it vertically and horizontally into eight parts, whether a picture element thereon is black or not is checked, and in the case of being block and when the segment extends in the direction vertical to the parting line, '1' is set to the corresponding bit. Subsequently, in the end, feature data of 14 bytes is obtained. This data is compared with dictionary data. At the time of comparison, by executing the comparison by shifting the bit, a difference of the form of a character can be absorbed to some extent. In such a way, since the character can be recognized by the data of 14 bytes per one character, the storage capacity of a dictionary can be curtailed, and the recognition can be executed at a high speed.