In this chapter, the authors have reviewed on optical character recognition. The study belongs to both typed characters and handwritten character recognition. Online and offline character recognition are two modes of data acquisition in the field of OCR and are also studied. As deep learning is the emerging machine learning method in the field of image processing, the authors have described the method and its application of earlier works. From the study of the recurrent neural network (RNN), a special class of deep neural network is proposed for the recognition purpose. Further, convolutional neural network (CNN) is combined with RNN to check its performance. For this piece of work, Odia numerals and characters are taken as input and well recognized. The efficacy of the proposed method is explained in the result section.