Apparatus and method for recognizing character

A character pattern is extracted from image data read from a document, listing, etc., and discriminated between a hand-written character and a typed character by a hand-written/typed character discrimination unit. The hand-written/typed character discrimination unit obtains, from the character pattern, N feature vectors containing a feature indicating at least the complexity and the linearity of the character pattern; and discriminating the character pattern between a hand-written character and a typed character using the feature vectors. A character recognition unit performs a character recognizing process based on the result of discriminating whether the character data is a hand-written character or a typed character. As a feature of the above described character pattern, the variance of line widths, the variance of character positions, etc. can also be used.