PURPOSE: To cope with the malformation of a character due to a simplified handwriting by showing the easy connection among the strokes of the simplified handwriting in the form of the rank information on the stroke and describing previously the connecting rules of the stroke based on the rank.

CONSTITUTION: A stroke feature point extracting device 3 stores the feature point trains to the writing point trains of each stroke sent from a preprocessor 2. A standard pattern store device 4 extracts only start and end points from each stroke and stores them. Therefore the candidate character group is decided by a candidate character group deciding device 9. In other words, the candidate character group is decided at the first stage by means of a rough matching method using only the start and end points of the strokes which is stable even with the simplified handwritten characters. Then at the second stage, the stroke rank connecting way is obtained so as to get the same number of strokes as an input pattern for each candidate character. Then a distance is calculated between the input patterns having same number of strokes and a standard pattern by a matching method using fine feature points. Thus the rough sorting output is obtained.