1. A method of automatically identifying character segments for character recognition, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of words and a ground truth corresponding to each word of the plurality of words; segmenting each word into at least one character segment based on the ground truth corresponding to each word; and refining the segmentation of each word by iteratively re-segmenting each word based on at least one similar character segment, wherein the at least one similar character segment is similar to the at least one character segment associated with each word.