Reading characters from the image

I need to write a program that can read alphabets from the image, suppose i click an image from a text book and i feed it to my program it should scan that image and get all thats written in text, can anyone gimmi some hints on how i can do that...? Thanks alot...!

[Sean de Wolski]

Look into optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms, there are tons of them and the one you choose is application specific.

[Walter Roberson]

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/?term=tag%3A%22ocr%22