An optical imaging system and a configuration characteristic algorithm are presented to reduce the difficulties in extracting intact characters image with weak contrast, in recognizing characters on fast moving beer bottles. The system consists of a hardware subsystem, including a rotating device, CCD, 16 mm focus lens, a frame grabber card, a penetrating lighting and a computer, and a software subsystem. The software subsystem performs pretreatment, character segmentation and character recognition. In the pretreatment, the original image is filtered with preset threshold to remove isolated spots. Then the horizontal projection and the vertical projection are used respectively to retrieve the character segmentation. Subsequently, the configuration characteristic algorithm is applied to recognize the characters. The experimental results demonstrate that this system can recognize the characters on beer bottles accurately and effectively; the algorithm is proven fast, stable and robust, making it suitable in the industrial environment.