A method and apparatus for generating a degraded character image at various levels of degradation automatically is presented in this invention. The method comprises rendering the character image on a scene plane; translating and rotating the scene plane according to various parameters; determining a projection region of the character image on an image plane according to various parameters; generating a pixel region mask; and generating a final degraded image by super-sampling. Thus various degraded character images are generated on various conditions of degradation. The generated synthetic characters can be used for performance evaluation and training data augmentation in optical character recognition (OCR).