AUTOMATIC CHARACTER RECOGNITION SYSTEM AND COMPUTER PRODUCT

An image-data-acquisition control unit controls an image-data acquiring unit that acquires computer-recognizable image data, to accumulate the image data in a set of information units. A character-recognition control unit controls an optical character-recognizing unit that extracts a character from the set of image data accumulated by the image-data-acquisition control unit, to accumulate a group of characters obtained by the optical character-recognizing unit in a set of character information units. Once a start signal is received from a starting unit, the image-data-acquisition control unit and the character-recognition control unit continue to operate independently.