1. A commodity recognition apparatus, comprising: a feature amount detection module configured to detect an appearance feature amount of a commodity included in an image captured by an image capturing unit; a commodity candidate extraction module configured to extract a candidate of the commodity included in the image by comparing the data of the appearance feature amount detected by the feature amount detection module with the feature amount data in a recognition dictionary file storing feature amount data representing the surface information of a commodity for each commodity which is a recognition target; a character recognition module configured to recognize a character string included in the image captured by the image capturing unit; and a commodity determination module configured to determine a commodity of a recognition target according to the character string recognized by the character recognition module and the candidate of the commodity extracted by the commodity candidate extraction module.