Character recognition device and character recognition method

The present invention provides a character recognition device and a character recognition method which recognize Chinese characters including traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters, accurately and at high speed. The same shape character table is stored in a character identification dictionary (165) by an arithmetic part (150), and candidate characters stored in the same shape character table are referred for recognizing the character. A character image having same Chinese character construction in which, the Chinese character formed of Chinese character elements of plural areas is divided into each area, and having similarity between Chinese character elements in a same area, in cosine similarity is higher than a predetermined value, and a character image having a Euclidean distance value between the Chinese character elements calculated by a Euclidean distance value calculation step is smaller than a predetermined value, are classified to a group as same shape characters having high similarity, in the same shape character table.