Abstract: Character recognition is an important application area of pattern recognition.Naxi Dongba pictographs are the world's only living pictographs and there is little study on their recognition.Two kinds of characteristics are firstly extracted from the characters with one by the coarse grid method and the other by the topological method.Then the support vector machine (SVM) is used to identify those characters with the two kinds of characteristics compared with the nearest neighbor method.Experiments are designed and the results show that SVM method using the combination of two kinds of characteristics performs better than other methods.