PURPOSE: To prevent remarkably a character from being read erroneously by performing readout processing eventually twice for the same document at a relatively high speed through simple constitution.

CONSTITUTION: A segmented pattern memory 10 is stored with a character pattern P1 which are segmented character by character. The character pattern P1 stored in the memory 10 is stored in a normalized pattern memory 12 as a normalized pattern P2. Further, the normalized patterns P2 in the memory 12 are supplied as the normalized patterns P3 to a recognizing circuit 14. The recognizing circuit 14 recognizes the normalized patterns P3 from the memory 12 and stores the recognition results in its own register temporarily. Further, the recognizing circuit 14 compares the respective recognition results and outputs the final answer or rejected result responding to the comparison result.