I never saw anything in VB.NET (and this is unlikely, by social reasons mostly) but tried some good codes in C#. This is nothing perfect yet and most of the works is not complete, but it looks feasible, as main work is done.
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.
Good luck.
—SA