The present paper proposes a new approach of preprocessing for handwritten, printed and isolated numeral characters. The new approach reduces the size of the input image of each numeral by discarding the redundant information. This method reduces also the number of features of the attribute vector provided by the extraction features method. Numeral recognition is carried out in this work through k nearest neighbors and multilayer perceptron techniques. The simulations have obtained a good rate of recognition in fewer running time. General Terms Pattern Recognition, image processing, feature extraction, neural network. Keywords Handwritten and printed numeral recognition, preprocessing, profile projection, k nearest neighbors, multilayer perceptron.