1. A device for detecting characters in an image, comprising: a Hough transformer arranged to identify, as identified elements of writing, circular arcs or elliptical arcs in the image or in a preprocessed version of the image; a character description generator arranged to acquire, on the basis of the identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs, a character description which describes locations of the identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs; and a database comparator arranged to compare the character description with a plurality of comparative character descriptions which have character codes associated with them, so as to provide, as a result of the comparison, a character code of a detected character; wherein the Hough transformer is arranged to identify, as identified elements of writing, individual circular arcs or elliptical arcs, which approximate a course of line of a character within a surrounding of local extremes, in the image or in a preprocessed version of the image, and to provide information about an orientation of an identified circular arc or elliptical arc; and the character description generator is arranged to acquire, based on the identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs and the information about the orientation, a character description which describes locations of the individual identified circular arcs or elliptical arcs.