A system and method for comparing a text image and a character string are provided. The method includes embedding a character string into a vectorial space by extracting a set of features from the character string and generating a character string representation based on the extracted features, such as a spatial pyramid bag of characters (SPBOC) representation. A text image is embedded into a vectorial space by extracting a set of features from the text image and generating a text image representation based on the text image extracted features. A compatibility between the text image representation and the character string representation is computed, which includes computing a function of the text image representation and character string representation.