Abstract: A system for recognition of characters on a medium. The system includes a scanner for scanning a medium such as a page of printed text and graphics and producing a bit-mapped representation of the page. The bit-mapped representation of the page is then stored in a memory means such as the memory of a computer system. A processor processes the bit-mapped image to produce an output comprising coded character representations of the text on the page. The present invention discloses parsing a page to allow for production of the output characters in a logical sequence, a combination of feature detection methods and template matching methods for recognition of characters and a number of methods for feature detection such as use of statistical data and polygon fitting.