Hi Tom,
I’d start with the OpenCV library, Tim has a guide on using it for facial recognition, but you should be able to adapt it or use it to learn before jumping into object recognitio:
As for text recognition, this is usually called OCR, and OpenCV has a library called Tesseract that can do it well from what I hear:
You should show us what you plan to make, I’m sure it’s interesting!
-James
