CHARACTER CUTTING-OUT SYSTEM

PURPOSE:To prevent the failure in character segmenting by setting a window having a necessary minimum size covering the next character and determining the position where the recognition rate is highest and segmenting characters while correcting error in the end position of the next character. CONSTITUTION:An addition value 12 of brightness in the breadthwise direction and an addition value 13 of brightness in the vertical direction of a character string 11 are obtained and are sliced with a threshold 14. The position where the addition value 12 in the breadthwise direction is larger than the threshold 14 and the addition value 13 in the vertical direction exceeds the threshold 14 first is found to obtain a position x0, y0 of the right most lower end of the character string 11, and this position is defined as a reference. In this state, a window 15 which has a necessary minimum size to cover character '2' in the right end of the character string is set in accordance with known size information of each character and the recognition processing is performed in the window 15 to obtain the position where the recognition rate is highest, and the position x0, y0 is correct. The correction value is given as a difference of the position where the recognition rate for the center of the window 15 is highest in case the position of the window 15 is set based on the position x0, y0 so that character '2' is placed in the center of the window 15.