Abstract: A method and apparatus for crushing waste gas cans between a pair of rotating rollers installed in a treatment chamber and removing the residual gas and residual liquid from the waste gas cans. The atmosphere in each of a waste gas can loading chamber, which is adjacent to the treatment chamber, the treatment chamber and a discharge chamber is replaced with an inert gas, thereby maintaining the oxygen concentration in the treatment chamber within a low range in which the residual gas will not burn explosively. Crushing of the waste gas cans is carried out while the oxygen concentration in the treatment chamber is within the low range. The pair of rotating rollers have two rotating shafts disposed approximately parallel to each other and sprocket wheels disposed on each rotating shaft at regular spacings.

Abstract: A character recognition post-processing method includes the steps of, extracting a reference character from a predetermined character string obtained by recognizing a character in the document, recognizing a character in the document, comparing characteristic of the reference character and same type characteristic of other characters in the character string, and correcting on the basis of results of the comparison, recognition results of characters other than the reference character and in the character string.