Read text from an image with PHP

Answer 1

The process you are looking for is called Optical Character Recognition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

There is a package available, called phpOCR, that does exactly what you need.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpocr/

Answer 2

That's called OCR. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition ).

It's not a trival task (that's why captcha's work as good as they do).

You'd be better of googling 'OCR PHP' if you want to find solutions.