CHARACTER RECOGNITION APPARATUS AND METHOD, USING WAVEFORM ANALYSIS

In a character recognition system an analog waveform representing an unknown character is developed. Samples of the waveform are generated and a value representing the sum of the voltage amplitudes of the samples in the first peak is developed in an accumulator (38). Processing means (46) divides this sum by the number of samples taken, stored in a counter (40), to arrive at a threshold voltage value which, when applied to the samples taken, determines the start of the character waveform. A predetermined number of samples of the waveform having maximum voltage amplitudes are normalized. A template matching unit (47) stores a plurality of templates each representing a known character and consisting of a number of windows. This unit (47) compares each normalized sample of the unknown character with each corresponding window of the template and the distance between the normalized sample and the window is found. The sum of the distances for each template is generated and the templates having the two minimum distances are selected by unit (47) and evaluated in a processor (49) to determine the unknown character.