1. A method for determining the characters most likely to be contained in a text string comprising the steps of: a. receiving at least one input image; b. localizing the region of the image that contains a text string; c. performing a plurality of correlations between each character region in the text string and multiple region character templates to output multiple regional correlation results for each character; d. combining the multiple regional correlation results outputs to output a single correlation output for the character region of the input image; e. selecting the most likely character based upon the character correlation output.