In a method for character recognition based on Gabor filter group the Gabor filter's joint spatial/spatial-frequency localization and capability to efficiently extract characters' local structural features are employed to extract, from the character image, information of the stroke direction of characters as the recognition information of characters, so as to improve the capability to resist the noises, backgrounds, brightness variances in images and the deformation of characters. Using this information, a simple and effective parameter design method is put forward to optimally design the Gabor filter, ensuring a preferable recognition performance; a corrected Sigmoid function is used to non-linearly adaptively process the stroke direction information output from the Gabor filter group. When extracting the feature from blocks, Gaussian filter array is used to process the positive and negative values output from Gabor filter group to enhance the discrimination ability of the extracted features.