Abstract: A multi-channel multi-genre character recognition discriminator is disclosed which performs the decision making process between strings of characters coming from a multi-channel (i.e., three or more channels) alpha-numeric output optical character reader (OCR) system for use in such applications as, for example, text processing and mail processing. The multi-channel output OCR uses separate recognition processes for each genre or character set indicative of a distinct group with respect to style (i.e., font) or form, and attempts to recognize each character independently as belonging to each respective genre.