Building book inventories using smartphones

Manual generation of a book inventory is time-consuming and tedious, while deployment of barcode and radio-frequency identification (RFID) management systems is costly and affordable only to large institutions. In this paper, we design and implement a mobile book recognition system for conveniently generating an inventory of books by snapping photos of a bookshelf with a smartphone. Since smartphones are becoming ubiquitous and affordable, our inventory management solution is cost-effective and very easy to deploy. Automatic and robust book recognition is achieved in our system using a combination of spine segmentation and bag-of-features image matching. At the same time, the location of each book is inferred from the smartphone's sensor readings, including accelerometer traces, digital compass measurements, and WiFi signatures. This location information is combined with the image recognition results to construct a location-aware book inventory. We demonstrate the effectiveness o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: MM
• Authors: David M. Chen, Sam S. Tsai, Bernd Girod, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, Kyu-Han Kim, Jatinder Pal Singh
• Keywords: Book Inventory, Book Recognition, MM 2010, Mobile Book Recognition, Multimedia