A task of the present invention is that even when a plurality of images exists in which the positions or sizes of character patterns indicating the identical object are different from each other, they can be treated as character patterns indicating the identical object. An image and supplementary information of the image, such as a photographing point and time, are input by an image input section (101) and are stored in an image data storage section (102). Character recognition in the image is performed by a character recognition section (103), and the recognition result is stored in a character recognition result storage section (104). An analysis section (106) extracts object character information relevant to an object from the image, the supplementary information, and the character recognition result on the basis of the analysis conditions input in a designation section (105) to thereby analyze an object, and the analysis result is output to a result output section (107). Accordingly, a change in the object can be analyzed by analyzing a change in character patterns indicating the identical object.