Incorrect Question. There is no "convert".
(What is that, this misuse of terminology looks pandemic in CodeProject's Inquirers. Who infected it first?!)
This is called OCR — Optical Character Recognition, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition[
^], see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_optical_character_recognition_software[
^]
Quite a difficult topic.
If you can read C# code you can find some solutions you can use in VB.NET. It's hard to find anything which is very good and complete at the same time.
Please look:
Neural Network OCR[
^],
Creating Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications using Neural Networks[
^],
OCR Line Detection[
^],
Unicode Optical Character Recognition[
^] — only those out of some 60 CodeProject search results are real original works you can further develop. You will need to select base method, add or improve training, perform training and store training results, add recognition and alignment of lines, put all together, etc.
It would be great if you have success and share your results.
Also, you can consider .NET wrapper for Tesseract (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)[
^]) called Tessernet:
http://www.pixel-technology.com/freeware/tessnet2/[
^]. I tested it a bit. It is not so good, in my opinion.
—SA