Recognizing characters from the complex image plays an important role in content-based image retrieval and has been well studied in past decades. The methods for normal characters recognition, however, become inapplicable when characters suffer from skew, uneven illumination, noise and anti-aliasing. A new method, named SC-HOG, is proposed in this paper for recognizing abnormal Chinese characters. Firstly, sparse coding is applied on abnormal character image to smooth noises and reduce anti-aliasing. Secondly, HOG features that help reducing the influence of skew and uneven illumination are extracted. Finally, these features are fed into a well-trained classifier to recognize the character of the given image. Experiments on both synthetic and real data sets show that the proposed method, SC-HOG, achieves high accuracy on abnormal Chinese characters recognition.