Abstract: A method and apparatus for hierarchical character recognition processing of ambiguous and noisy characters which produces highly reliable results at high levels of hierarchical processing. The invention first applies a universal classifier system (which may comprise one or more universal classifiers) to input image data, and identifies "suspicious" characters. The image data for suspicious characters is then applied to a "specialist" classifier that is designed to handle only a narrow and well-defined set of recognition cases. This hierarchical processing architecture and method results in increased accuracy of recognition. The method is particularly applicable to handwritten characters and to distorted and noisy machine-printed characters.