PURPOSE: To segment characters differing in size freely by checking the presence of some predetermined part of a compressed pattern, and segmenting one charactor according to the character frame signal.

CONSTITUTION: A shift register 20 laterally compresses an picture signal to be stored in a memory to generate a compressed pattern. The signal obtained by ORing its output signal with the output signal INDTA of a slicer is inputted. A counter 21 checks the column number of the picture signal to be stored in the memory. In this example, a character frame is an wide as 30 columns, so a signal R30 is generated when the counter 21 goes up to 29. At this time, if there is no black bit at the high-order digits of the register 20, a signal FRAMEN is generated to set an FF22, and a signal END is generated to complete the character segmentation. When, however there is a black bit, the character segmentation is not ended and the counter 21 further goes up to 63, holding the image signal in the memory until a signal R64 is generated.