CHARACTER RECOGNITION APPARATUS AND CHARACTER RECOGNITION METHOD

An objective is to eliminate dotted lines in a character box in image data to increase the character recognition rate. There are some cases in which a dotted line candidate cannot be extracted due to many overlapping parts of dotted lines and characters or due to a blurry part in a dotted line. In such cases, the position of a dotted line candidate is estimated referring to features such as the interval, length, width, etc. of a dotted line candidate in the same character box (or in a character box for another relevant item), and image data of the estimated position and image data of a previously extracted dotted line (or a reference dotted line) are compared to determine whether or not they are an identical dotted line.