1. A character recognition system, comprising: a scanner having an aligned, one dimensional array of photosensitive elements mounted thereon and grouped into a plurality of sections, each section including at least one of said photosensitive elements and forming a unit region, said scanner being adapted to be moved in a direction substantially normal to the direction of alignment of said array to thereby scan characters and/or symbols arranged in parallel with the scanning direction, first means responsive to an output of said scanner for counting the number of occurrences of character segments for each of said unit regions to obtain a segment occurrence frequency distribution in the direction of alignment of said array, second means responsive to an output of said scanner for counting the number of scans in the direction of alignment of said array for each of said unit regions, starting when the first and/or last character segment is detected and ending when one character scan is completed, to thereby obtain the front side and/or rear side shape of the character, and third means for recognizing the character according to the character segment occurrence frequency distribution and the front and/or rear shape of the character.