In order to achieve scale- and rotation-invariance in recognizing unoccluded objects in binary images using Zernike moment features, an image of an object has often been normalized first by its zeroth-order moment (ZOM) or area. With elongated objects such as characters, a stroke width varies with the threshold value used, it becomes one or two pixels wider or thinner. The variations of the total area of the character becomes significant when the character is relatively thin with respect to its overall size, and the resulting normalized moment features are no longer reliable. This dilation/erosion effect is more severe when the object is not focused precisely. In this paper, we analyze the ZOM method and propose as a normalization method, the maximum enclosing circle (MEC) centered at the centroid of the character. We compare both the ZOM and MEC methods in their performance through various experiments.