This paper deals with recognition of off-line unconstrained Oriya handwritten numerals. To take care of variability involved in the writing style of different individuals, the features are mainly considered from the contour of the numerals. At first, the bounding box of a numeral is segmented into few blocks and chain code histogram is computed in each of the blocks. Features are mainly based on the direction chain code histogram of the contour points of these blocks. Neural Network (NN) classifier and quadratic classifier are used separately for recognition and the results obtained from these two classifiers are compared. We tested the result on 3850 data collected from different individuals of various background and we obtained 90.38% (94.81%) recognition accuracy from NN (quadratic) classifier with a rejection rate of about 1.84% (1.31%), respectively.