As the rapid progress of digital imaging technology, camera based character recognition receives more and more attentions. One challenge in camera based OCR is the recognition for degraded text. Conventional OCR engines usually recognize on binary image. However, the performance drops dramatically as the degradation level increases. In this paper, a new recognition method is proposed to recognize degraded character based on dual eigenspace decomposition and synthetic degraded data. Then, the degraded character string is segmented by the combination of binary and grayscale analysis. Experiments on single character and text string recognition prove the effectiveness of our method.