1. A character recognition method used for extracting a character area from a recognition target object in a motion picture and recognizing a character in said character area, said character recognition method comprising the steps of: picking up images in the motion picture by changing brightness for each of the images; extracting at least one character area from each image; recognizing at least one character in said character area by performing a matching process between said character area and dictionary images for each image, and determining a character recognition result for each image; and selecting a final character recognition result of which a matching degree is the highest from the character recognition results of said images.