CHARACTER RECOGNITION APPARATUS

A character recognition apparatus has an image data generating section for storing image data corresponding to a character array on a sheet of paper and for generating a series of scan line data constituting one item of image data; a segmentation control section for generating starting and end scan line data which define a segment of each character data in accordance with the scan line data sequentially generated from the image data generating section; and a recognizing section for detecting any similarities between the reference character data and the character data generated from the data generating section in accordance with the starting and end scan line data and for generating effective data character data which has the largest similarity which is larger than a predetermined value. When none of the similarities exceed the predetermined value, the recognizing section supplies a control signal to the segmentation control section to update one item of the starting and end scan line data, thereby allowing the image data generating section to generate character data for a different segment.