PURPOSE: To realize the character recognition which is not affected by the size and the distortion of characters, by detecting the outline of a character as coordinate values after reading the character optically to store it in a memory and detecting change points of the outline on a basis of these coordinate values to extract features.

CONSTITUTION: The surface of a medium where characters are written is scanned by an optical reader 11, and the white or the black state of each coordinate point is read and is stored in a memory (RAM)12, and isolated black points are eliminated in a preprocessing part 13, and features are extracted in a feature extracting part 14. In the feature extracting part 14, information in the RAM12 are used in an outline tracking part 21 to read X and Y coordinates while detecting only the outline of a character clockwise with the apex of the black point as the start point, and this coordinate read is terminated by the return to the start point. A direction change point detector 22 uses these X and Y coordinates to detect change points where X and Y coordinates are changed from increment to reduction or from reduction to increment, and an order is given to these data to output them, and these data are stored in a storage device 23. These stored contents are compared with contents of a reference data storage part 17 in a recognizing part 15 to identify the character.