Purchase the product that is right for you using your mobile phone :
This work is being done as a class project for
CMPS 290B - Computational Photography which is taught by Professor
James Davis at the
University of California: Santa Cruz. Here is a PDF file containing my Intro and
References.
So imagine the following scenario. You are at the grocery store and need to buy some paper towels. You go to the back wall to pick out a paper towell. But oh no! There is 40 different paper towels from which to choose, and these come from 12 different companies! How do you decide which paper towel to buy? Currently, the two pieces of information with which we have to base our decision are typically the prices and the marketing (shiny packaging, cute logos, etc). With such limited information it is difficult to make the decision that is best for you, with your own individual and personal tastes.
But luckily you have a mobile phone! This phone has access to your carriers wireless data network, and therefore the internet. The question is, how to tell your phone what product you want information for, and where to get that information from?
Enter my project. The goal of this project is to create an end-to-end system for getting information on a project onto your mobile phone. Step 1 is to find the UPC barcode on the item (or items) you are interested in. Next, use the camera mode of your phone to take a picture of the bar code. The phone automatically decodes the barcode to optain the unique UPC code for this product. This UPC code is then sent to a database where information on the product is retrieved and sent to your phone. This information will allow you to make the product purchase that is right for you.
This project has three main components:
-Implement a barcode recognition/decoding algorithm on the Nokia n95 phone
-Create a database containing information on a large number of products (over 1 million products). This database will have information such as: allergens, recalls, environmental friendliness, and any other data I can find
-An interface on the phone to present the information from this database in a compact and easy-to-interpret format