i need an advice on how to approach this problem. I have some picture data: *.jpg, *.bmp ... and i need to extract the data from it. The data is alphanumeric text. I work in delphi.
You will have to head for a OCR (Optical Character Recognition) library. This is a pretty complex procedure, I believe you wouldn't be asking this question if you knew any way to implement this by yourself.
A quick Google yielded this result, maybe it's of help for you: http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=1623&lngWId=7