Optical reading apparatus, character recognition processing apparatus, character reading method and program, magnetic ink character reading apparatus, and POS terminal apparatus

An optical reading apparatus and optical character recognition processing apparatus operating in conjunction with a magnetic ink character reading apparatus reduce the time in reading a string of characters formed in a line on a processed medium. This is done in the optical reading and recognition operations by selectively using a broad recognition area that allows for variation in character positions and a narrower recognition area where the probability of the desired character string being present is high depending on past results. An extracted image containing the character string is acquired from scanned image data and the recognition process is run. If recognition succeeds, the next matching area is set to a relatively narrow predicted range and the recognition process is applied to the predicted range. If character recognition succeeds within a specified distance, the next matching area is set to a relatively narrow predicted range. If character recognition does not succeed within the specified distance, the next matching area is set to the full width of the extracted image.