Abstract: An OCR 300 stores signals representative of reference characters and scans a document 302 to generate a bit mapped digitized image of the document. After the characters and the words are recognized and candidate characters are identified, the initial results are post-processed to compare clusters of identical images to the candidates. Where the candidates of all equivalent images in a cluster are the same, the candidates are output as representative of the image on the document. Where the candidates are different, a majority of identical candidates determines the recognized candidates. Other post-processing operations include verification and re-recognition.