A method for recognizing characters in an image of a document having at least one alphanumeric field. The method has the steps of: segmenting the image to identify objects therein; defining a bounding box around each object; making multiple successive selections based on different descriptors and dividing the bounding boxes into a plurality of cells for each of which a texture descriptor is determined as a gradient oriented histogram; performing character recognition on the finally selected bounding boxes. A device for implementing the method.