1. A character recognition apparatus comprising: a stroke extracting unit that extracts a plurality of strokes from a recognition target; a noise-candidate extracting unit that extracts noise candidates from the plurality of strokes; a generating unit that generates a plurality of recognition result candidates obtained by removing at least one of the noise candidates from the recognition target; a unit that performs character recognition on the plurality of recognition result candidates and that obtains recognition scores; and a specifying unit that uses the recognition scores to specify a most likely recognition result candidate from the plurality of recognition result candidates as a recognition result.