PURPOSE: To reduce the burden of the operator in correction, by using picture data to be recognized and feature data, which is obtained by recognizing this picture data, as materials for discrimination and correcting a character with a retry loop when the character cannot be discriminated.

CONSTITUTION: A picture on a medium 1 is cut properly by a cutting circuit 3 and has features extracted, and characters are recognized on a basis of a dictionary 6 by a discriminating circuit 5. If a character cannot be discriminated, the retry loop is started, and feature data obtained by a feature extracting circuit 4 is led to a line break discriminating circuit 9. After the discrimination output of this line break discriminating circuit 9 is corrected by a connection correcting circuit 10, it is inputted to the feature extracting circuit 4 again. Hereafter, the dicriminating work for the unrecognizable character with this retry loop is executed till time-out (time limit).