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[GSoC 09] Barcode Reader and Shopping Assistant .

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amit.pureenergy at gmail

Apr 22, 2009, 6:10 AM

Post #1 of 3 (554 views)
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[GSoC 09] Barcode Reader and Shopping Assistant .

Hello,

I am Amit Sethi and I will be working on the project Barcode Reader and
Shopping Assistant .
The idea of the project is to use the camera on Internet tablets to read
the barcode on a product and search the prices etc of the product on the
various shopping websites like amazon and also develop the users wish list
etc...

The major requirements of the project as yet is to develop code that will
recognize the kind of barcode and hence see what library is to be used to
read the particular barcode on the product .

The other part would be using the webservices API of amazon and Librarything
to develop the Shopping Assistant .

1. The recognition part is to be done fast so I will be using C for it.
2. For the webservices part the major limiting factor would be Internet
Bandwidth and thus their is no point of using a low level language so i will
be using python for this .
3. To create the binding between C code and python i will be using
maemoswig.

I am looking at ReadBarC <http://sourceforge.net/projects/readbarc/> , a
Barcode reading library for Nokia Symbian phones as my inspiration .

I invite suggestions and also some use cases that people on list might like
to see in the Shopping Assistant

Other Details
I am under-grad student at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University , New
Delhi , India .
My IRC nick name and garage user name are amit_usual

I look forward to summer of coding for this project and great discussions
with people on this list.

--
A-M-I-T S|S

S.G.Pickering at bath

Apr 22, 2009, 6:43 AM

Post #2 of 3 (525 views)
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RE: [GSoC 09] Barcode Reader and Shopping Assistant . [In reply to]

Hi Amit,

> The other part would be using the webservices API of amazon
> and Librarything to develop the Shopping Assistant .

<snip>

> 2. For the webservices part the major limiting factor would
> be Internet Bandwidth and thus their is no point of using a
> low level language so i will be using python for this .

I guess you're talking about time taken here rather than data required
when you mention bandwidth. I don't know much about the services you
mention, but if it turns out that these are not sufficient and scraping
of actual human-readable webpages is required, I'd suggest that using a
server to perform the web scraping as requested by the app might be
worthwhile. This is the technique used in the Google Android competition
winning Android Scan (now renamed to something else) and was my initial
inspiration. Scroll right to the bottom of this page:
http://scan.jsharkey.org/. I note that his backend server is written in
Python too.

Good luck with the project!

Cheers,

Simon

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amit.pureenergy at gmail

Apr 23, 2009, 7:07 AM

Post #3 of 3 (511 views)
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Re: [GSoC 09] Barcode Reader and Shopping Assistant . [In reply to]

Hi ,
Great Reference ,
I especially like the idea of playing sample music clips , one of amazon
services i myself like a lot.
But i am wondering though that how would I be able to search such a server
faster than Amazon or other services.
Also what if such a server is down.
Also screen scraping is a good idea if we can deliver really cool things
like sample music and reading reviews etc.... Otherwise I think it would
too much of a overhead

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:13 PM, Simon Pickering
<S.G.Pickering [at] bath>wrote:

> Hi Amit,
>
> > The other part would be using the webservices API of amazon
> > and Librarything to develop the Shopping Assistant .
>
> <snip>
>
> > 2. For the webservices part the major limiting factor would
> > be Internet Bandwidth and thus their is no point of using a
> > low level language so i will be using python for this .
>
> I guess you're talking about time taken here rather than data required
> when you mention bandwidth. I don't know much about the services you
> mention, but if it turns out that these are not sufficient and scraping
> of actual human-readable webpages is required, I'd suggest that using a
> server to perform the web scraping as requested by the app might be
> worthwhile. This is the technique used in the Google Android competition
> winning Android Scan (now renamed to something else) and was my initial
> inspiration. Scroll right to the bottom of this page:
> http://scan.jsharkey.org/. I note that his backend server is written in
> Python too.
>
> Good luck with the project!
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Simon
>
> _______________________________________________
> maemo-community mailing list
> maemo-community [at] maemo
> https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-community
>

--
A-M-I-T S|S

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