Project Title - Library and bookshop companion mobile app

Find your way in the library easy!

Scope: With so many books on offer in a bookshop or library, choosing the right one for you can be a tricky task. One way to get around this problem is to use numerous review sites on the Internet providing readers' feedback/reviews. For instance, sites like Amazon have many such resources. However, accessing such sites from a mobile phone can be inconvenient as book data would need to be typed by hand into browser to search for a book.

Aim: The goal of this project is to develop a system that will use optical character recognition to get the book data (title, author, etc), automatically prepare a search query, retrieve pages describing the book from a third party source (like Amazon), and present reviews to the user. Using such system, the user should be able to take a picture of the book cover page and obtain quickly the book reviews, so that the application can be easily used on a smart phone while in front of a book shelf.

Technical areas: The project will need to investigate integration of the book search function with an existing OCR program and implement extraction of book review information from a third-party web site (like Amazon) and presenting it to the user in a convenient format.