Abstract: A character recognition method comprising the following steps: (1) acquiring a two dimensional array of pixels, (2) locating an unknown character in the two dimensional array, (3) computing correlation coefficients between an unknown character and a trained set of characters (i.e., a font), (4) recognizing the unknown character as the trained character with the highest correlation coefficient above a threshold. The manner in which trained characters are chosen is described herein as a correlation search. Correlation search results in a fast means of correctly classifying an unknown character from a large training set, often on the second or third try, depending on the inner-correlations of the trained characters.