Abstract: A character recognition and communication system, wherein a character appearing on a document is converted into a character image signal at a transmission terminal including, for example, a facsimile scanner and transmitted to the prescribed center, after the character represented by the image signal is identified by a communication network including switching equipment; the communication network comprises a plurality of switching units, and the corresponding recognition control units and character recognition units all scattered throughout said network and connected together by a common interconnection circuit; and the plural character recognition units recognize characters by different processes, have a complementary relationship with each other and recognize with high precision various kinds of characters supplied from a plurality of terminals and transmit the recognized characters to the corresponding centers.

Abstract: A character in a pattern area is optically scanned and the scanned black and white signal cells of the character are stored in a digital memory. The character in the digital memory is recognized through an initial feature extraction process, unification process, concentration process, and recognition process. In the initial feature extraction process each cell thus scanned is encoded according to the presence of a character line or a black cell in a predetermined direction from each cell. The unification process unifies the code of each cell according to a predetermined algorithm, and the concentration process provides a concentrated code for each cell. The recognition process counts each of the concentrated codes and determines the class to which the character to be recognized belongs when the number of particular concentrated codes reaches a predetermined threshold which is defined for each class.