METHOD FOR RECOGNIZING CHARACTER

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To improve the convenience of the result of character recognition by recognizing the characters of cells in areas in a fixed relation within the same row as one character string. SOLUTION: The table structure of a tabular document is recognized to extract ruled lines and when a ruled line dividing adjacent cells in a row is a dot line, the adjacent cells are integrated to perform the character recognition of them as one cell. It is possible that after integrating the adjacent cells, the dot line dividing the adjacent cells is deleted to character-recognize the integrate cells. It is also possible that after integrating the adjacent cells, the adjacent cells are character-recognized individually to combine the results of the character recognition. When the respective sizes of the adjacent cells are smaller than a fixed threshold and their shapes are similar to each other, the cells can be integrated. Furthermore, it is possible to perform character recognition by integrating plural cells held between the right and left ruled lines of the item area by each row concerning cells in a row lower than the item area of the tabular document.