With the rapid development of the economy, digital transformation has become a future trend. Character recognition (CR) technology, as a key technology to realize digitalization, has always been a hot research topic that people pay attention to. CR can be widely used in the fields of transportation, finance, industry, economy and artificial intelligence. In-depth study of CR technology is of great practical significance for promoting the development of science and technology and economy. In this context, this paper studies the printed CR method based on CNN. Combining wavelet theory and CNN, this paper studies the extraction and recognition methods and implementation ways of printed characters in detail. The algorithm applied in this paper is recognized on the DSP (DM642) chip, the recognition accuracy is over 99.93%, and the recognition time is controlled within 5ms, which meets the actual requirements. Comprehensive analysis verifies the feasibility and superiority of the recognition algorithm applied in this paper.