At present, recognizing Tamil characters is considered as one of the most provoking and challenging taskssince there exist discontinuities, slanting, huge differences as well as free-style property characters. In such cases, the error value is enhanced and most of the error arises due to the chaos between the characters having analogous shapes. In addition to this, the time required for processing is also increased. To overcome such shortcomings, recognition of Tamil characters is proposed comprising of four principal stages namely Pre-processing, Segmentation, Feature extraction and classification phase. In the initial data pre-processing phase, the input images are pre-processed by employing thresholding binarization, adaptive filter for noise elimination as well as cropping. Secondly, segmentation is employed typically for verifying an object as well as various boundaries like lines, curves, bends, etc. For optimal segmentation, this paper utilizes Tsallis entropy-based atom search (TEAS) optimization algorithm. Then the segmented features are fed to extract the features and finally in the classification phase, the Tamil characters are recognized effectively. Here, this paper utilizes deep convolution extreme learning-based Newton Metaheuristic (DCELM-NM) approach for both feature extraction and classification. The performances of the proposed approach are evaluated using various simulation measures to visualize the effectiveness. In addition to this, the comparative analyses are carried out and the results reveal that the proposed approach provides superior performance when compared with existing approaches.