CHARACTER RECOGNIZING APPARATUS, METHOD, AND STORAGE MEDIUM

It is an object of the invention to improve output precision of a final recognition result by further obtaining and applying a forward-chain probability in addition to a backward-chain probability in a Bi-gram statistic process, as a post-processing in the case where a plurality of candidate characters are outputted to one input pattern as a result of character recognition. An apparatus according to the invention has a backward-chain dictionary and a forward-chain dictionary of characters, obtains a chain probability from the i-th character to the (i+1)th character by using the backward-chain dictionary, further obtains a chain probability from the (i+1)th character to the i-th character by using the forward-chain dictionary, and selects the character of the final output result from a plurality of candidate characters on the basis of a value obtained by unifying those chain probabilities.