11. The apparatus of claim 10, in which: the preliminary character recognition means is additionally for generating a distance value between the feature vector of the input character and the reference vector of the candidate category; the distance value of each input character is stored in the character information store; and the recognized character selection means includes: means for receiving the distance values from the character information store, and means for selecting an input character having a low distance value as a selected input character.
10. An apparatus for recognizing characters, the apparatus comprising: a recognition dictionary in which are stored reference vectors derived from writing samples provided by non-specified writers, each of the reference vectors representing a category; preliminary character recognition means for comparing a feature vector of each input character in an input character pattern to the reference vectors in the recognition dictionary to preliminarily determine the candidate category to which the input character belongs; a character information store in which the feature vector and the candidate category of each input character are stored; recognized character selection means for selecting, from the input characters stored in the character information store, each of the input characters that has been recognized with high reliability as a selected input character; writer-specific reference vector generating means for receiving the feature vectors of the selected input characters from the character information store, and for generating therefrom a writer-specific reference vector for each category, the feature vector of each selected input character being used to generate the writer-specific reference vector for at least one category different from the candidate category to which the selected input character belongs; and final character recognition means, operating in response to the writer-specific reference vector for each category, for finally determining the category to which each input character belongs.