Patent US 4,288,779

A method for character reading requiring no character segmentation, which method effects required character recognition by the steps of subjecting a given string of character patterns to continuous scanning to produce either a local feature vector at each of the intersections of rows and columns of character patterns or a global feature vector for each of the columns formed in consequence of the scanning, linearly consolidating either or both of the feature vectors to obtain a lower dimensional vector in new feature axes and continuously matching the vectors with the standard ones set in advance.