Patent US 4,185,271

The character reading system is provided with a pretreating system for a pattern recognition and a picture translation wherein a pattern signal obtained by scanning a character pattern on a recording medium is processed at such high threshold level that does not contain a noise component to form a primary kernel pattern, and the pattern signal is processed at such low threshold level that contains said character pattern to obtain a reference pattern. The kernel pattern and the reference pattern are masked on a memory device to have predetermined size and subjected to connecting operation when they are read out by forward scanning to form a connected secondary kernel pattern. The secondary kernel pattern and the reference pattern are masked to have predetermined size and then reversely scanned to subject both patterns to the second connecting operation thereby producing a last kernel pattern.