21–30 of 142 posts
Not sure if this will help - https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/
https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ben-shahar/Teaching/Computational-...
Won't be as accurate as barcode scanning, but will be definitely less time consuming.
One of these days I need to write my essay titled "Rubbish has no SKU". I've seen a few of these, and the basic minimum difference between "pulp waiting to happen" and "bookshop" is basic shelving. Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise. Now it's possible for browsers to actually find things. When you put them on Amazon this will also help find th…
At a local LP shop, they had a sign saying "If you misshelve a LP, you might as well steal it, at least someone will listen to it" (approximate translation). Shelving in instead central to many specialty shops!
One of these days I need to write my essay titled "Rubbish has no SKU". I've seen a few of these, and the basic minimum difference between "pulp waiting to happen" and "bookshop" is basic shelving. Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise. Now it's possible for browsers to actually find things. When you put them on Amazon this will also help find th…
In a bookstore, this is a virtue. But we appear to be dealing with a book barn. Perhaps the patrons of book barn have not wandered in by accident while searching for a bookstore :)
For OP: I think you might be better off photographing the ISBN and then using a service or script to do a lookup and associate that with a cover and title. Various editions might not have their covers recorded in a database, and titles will give many dupes, but an ISBN will uniquely identify a book.
Additionally, OCR'ing stylized text is problematic. I wouldn't expect easy reading of covers, particularly of used books.
Not sure if this will help - https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/
Using computer vision may provide a good enough result for this use case. An interesting approach would be to segment the book piles and bulk scan the spines. There are projects that already tackled this problem: https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ben-shahar/Teaching/Computational-... Won't be as accurate as barcode scanning, but will be definitely less time consuming.
Annoyingly, I was trying to scan multiple books in charity shops, when one of my favourites started putting their own stickers directly over the barcode (when it existed).
I worked at a small startup in the early 2000s that somehow got massive contract to digitalise a Middle Eastern Oil & Gas company's very very extensive documentation library. We had an e-learning product where you could use a scanner to digitalise a printed book into online documentation.
Demos of scanning a book or two was really impressive. So surely scanning more than a million books/manuals/charts will be just as easy. Not quite.
Think we calculated it would take years as the bottleneck is the manual unbinding and re-binding before and after scanning. Scale that to a million and it was not the 2 months project initially forecasted. Buying more scanners and hiring more local staff scaled that part horizontally and improved the speed but still a long project.
However the client "forgot" to pay us for a few months, the bank and our accountants forgot to check and we went bankrupt soon before we really got started. Though at least I got a trip to the Middle East for a few weeks.
One of these days I need to write my essay titled "Rubbish has no SKU". I've seen a few of these, and the basic minimum difference between "pulp waiting to happen" and "bookshop" is basic shelving. Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise. Now it's possible for browsers to actually find things. When you put them on Amazon this will also help find th…
While I largely agree with your sentiment, I'd like to note that alphabetizing only assists those who know what they are looking for. In a bookstore, this is a virtue. But we appear to be dealing with a book barn. Perhaps the patrons of book barn have not wandered in by accident while searching for a bookstore :) For OP: I think you might be better off photographing the ISBN and then using a service or script to do a…