Recognizing Ancient Tamil Inscription Characters Enable Archeologists To Reveal Historical Events In Ancient Sri Lanka. Currently, This Is Done By The Archaeology Experts With A Huge Effort. The Inefficiency Of This Manual Procedure Will Negatively Impact On The Future Research In Field Of Archaeology. This Research Involves In Developing An Application With Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Functionality To Recognize Ancient Tamil Inscription. This Paper Focus On The OCR Module Of The Application. OCR Module Comprises Of The Technologies Of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) And Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Experiments Were Carried Out To Evaluate The Recognition Rate Of The Two OCR Technologies Which Performs On Train Data, Test Data (preprocessed) And Test Data (real Images). After Evaluating Each OCR Solution, CNN Was Selected As The Best Resulted OCR Solution. Lack Of Data Is The Main Limitation Of This Research And It Will Be Highly Impacted On The OCR Accuracy.
