Apparatus for scanning and recognizing characters comprises: an optical sensor for capturing images, which optical sensor carries out continuous shooting of the scanned characters to obtain an image frame sequence containing the scanned characters, and the content of an image frame partly overlaps content of the previous image frame in the sequence; and a control module for processing the images and recognizing the characters. The control module divides the image frames in the image frame sequence into groups of image frames including reference frames, skip frames and predictive frames according to the overlapping contents, and combines the standard frames and the predictive frames into a panorama image, taking a group of image frames as a unit, and carries out character recognition after performing skew correction based on the panorama image, to obtain the character codes of the scanned characters. The skip frames can be skipped directly, increasing the splicing speed.