1. A method of identifying a sequence of alphanumeric characters, comprising the steps of: (a) producing a grey level image of said character sequence, (b) locating potential characters from said grey level image including filtering said image with a long horizontal and long vertical line segments removal filter, (c) normalizing the size and contrast of said extracted potential characters as grey level character images, and (d) inputting said normalized potential characters as grey level character images to a character recognition means, wherein said character recognition means comprises two network classifiers, a first one of said network classifiers comprising a first hidden layer feed forward neural network which classifies the input pattern into a first set of categories, and the second one of said network classifiers comprising a second hidden layer feed forward neural network which recognizes the pattern from the first set of pattern categories.