It's an optical character recognition (ocr) web service. Send it images, it will send you back any text it can find in there.
It uses Tesseract.
You can deploy it with Docker
docker build -t docker/read-me .
docker run -p 50000:8080 -d docker/read-me
Alternatively, install Tesseract and its training data (see the Dockerfile), then run it up with:
npm install
node app.js
Run the test with mocha
Post an image to the service, like this one:
curl -i -F image=@test/testfiles/abbey_road.jpg http://localhost:8080/ocr
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Express
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 28
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 18:50:44 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ABBEY
ROAD NW8