PURPOSE: To obtain both the expansion/contraction compensating value and the inclination compensating value of a picture data, by using the recording information of the storing region provided to an ordinary optical reader and a reading control data of a slip which is previously given.

CONSTITUTION: The image information of a slip which is read by an external facsimile device is received at a transmission control part 101 and then decoded by a decoder 103. In this case, a control part 102 knows an indentification ID line 201 from the reading control data FC of a prescribed slip and stores the picture data in the line buffers 104A and 104B respectively. Then the output of the buffer 104A is selected by a selector 105, and a character recognizing part 106 starts the recognition of characters. The part 106 gives compensation to the character reading position obtained by the data FC on the basis of the calculated skew value and expansion/contraction factor and then detect and segment the characters.