A character recognition system is disclosed in which each character in a retina, defining a scanning raster, is scanned with random lines uniformly distributed over the retina. For each type of character to be recognized the system stores a probability density function (PDF) of the random line intersection lengths and/or a PDF of the random line number of intersections. As an unknown character is scanned, the random line intersection lengths and/or the random line number of intersections are accumulated and based on a comparison with the prestored PDFs a classification of the unknown character is performed
