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I am creating an android application to recognize book in a library. What I do is I will take a image of the book spine of a book and send it to a server to do the image process there and recognize the book from a database and send the details about the book to the phone or if book is not there, it will recognize the optical characters and send it to the mobile application. I am hoping to do the image processing process using C#. The book recognition is done using a template image comparing which are in the database with the sent image. So I need some help figuring out what would be the best approach to do this. I have already researched on some methods such as

  1. Template matching
  2. Pattern recognition
  3. feature recognition

I want to know when it comes to images like books what would be the recommended method which I better follow. And Is there any good APIs for this. I have researched on OpenCV but want to know if there are better APIs. And how can I use OCR when recognizing the book. I want application to be fast. Normally when we compare two book spines(template and image) if i get 60% of similarities I can assume its the same book. So I am searching for the optimal way...! Help me out with this...!

Steve
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Gihan
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    This question is overly broad. From the FAQ: `You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.` – Steve Jan 20 '12 at 03:32
  • Have you seen **Delicious Library** @ http://www.delicious-monster.com/ ? They use the barcode on the back of the book... that seems a lot easier. – Steve Jan 20 '12 at 03:39
  • i can understand what you are saying. what i mentioned it too long may be. All I want to know is is there any other mechanisms other than which i have already gone through which are efficient..! – Gihan Jan 20 '12 at 04:04
  • Yes I have looked in to the bar cord mechanism. but I want to do this without taking the books out of racks. bar codes are only available in the backside of the book. not on the book spine. – Gihan Jan 20 '12 at 04:06
  • And barcodes are only on books in the last 40+ years, whereas spine recognition is, in theory, timeless... – davewasthere Oct 31 '17 at 05:23

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While I have limited knowledge in the field of image processing, there is a library which offers such facilities: AForge.NET. That might be good as a starting reference.

EDIT: for an introductory explanation of the theory behind image processing, this may also offer some guidance: http://www.societyofrobots.com/programming_computer_vision_tutorial.shtml

James Shuttler
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  • Thanks for the info really appreciate it. I was going through Aforge.Net and Emgu opencv cross compiler. I will look in to these tutorials.. tnx again..!! – Gihan Jan 20 '12 at 03:34
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I understand that you are looking for some API or "already-built" image processing library to help you with this, but this answer might help you in a way, or other people who want to pursue something like this.

There are some pretty helpful research papers (including tests from successful implementations) on this Mobile Visual Search page at Stanford. Check out the heading "Book Spine Recognition for Asset Tracking" on that page.

Nilesh
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