APPARATUS, PROGRAM AND METHOD FOR RECOGNIZING CHARACTER

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To improve character recognition rates.SOLUTION: The character recognition apparatus includes: a first character recognition unit 214 that performs character recognition on image information to acquire a plurality of recognition result candidate characters with respect to an image region recognized as one character in the image information; a mask image storing unit 222 that stores a mask image as character image information; a mask processing unit 215 that refers to the mask image storing unit, acquires a mask image corresponding to each of the recognition result candidate characters to generate logical product images by calculating a logical product between the mask image and the image region recognized as one character; a second character recognition unit 216 that performs character recognition on each of the logical product images to determine the recognition character as a character corresponding to the logical product image and similarity between the recognition image and the logical product image; and a deciding unit 217 that decides a character corresponding to the image region recognized as one character from among the recognition characters, on the basis of the similarity between each of the recognition characters and the logical image, which has been determined by the second character recognition unit.