It is an object of the present invention to improve a rate of recognition and recognition speed, reduce a degree of a specification required for a device forming a photographing device or a system and lower consumed electric power and a cost. In a character recognition processing method according to the present invention, a character image as an object whose character is to be recognized is displayed on a display (12) together with a cursor of a character frame for recognizing a character. While the cursor is set to a character string as an object to be recognized, the character image is photographed by a photographing part (9). In an image fetching part (3), the image data of the photographed character image is fetched. In a layout analyzing part (5), the fetched image data of the character image and cursor position information from a cursor control part (4) corresponding to the character image are received. The image data is collated with the cursor position information to analyze the arrangement of the lines or characters of the character string as the object to be recognized. Then, in a character cutting part (6), the character is cut on the basis of the analyzed result. The character is recognized relative to the character image by a character recognizing part (7) to convert the image data to character data.