According to the characteristics of medicine bottle labels, a method of character positioning which combines mathematical morphology with projective characteristics is provided. According to the method, firstly, the images of the medicine bottle labels are preprocessed so as to reduce the distortion extent of characters caused by cylindrical surfaces and the processed images will be performed binary and edge detection etc. Secondly, the images are performed mathematical morphology process many times to be divided into several connecting regions. According to the prior knowledge and contour tracking scheme, the characters area can be got. Finally, the images can be segmented into three separate characters by the level projection and image segmentation method. The accurate positioning of target characters is completed so as to segment and recognize succeeding single character. The experiment results show that the method is effective on the medicine bottle label position.