Beerscan project

After months, took another look to the (little) code I already have for Beerscan. I found an article about launching the camera, and I applied this to the current app. I now can take pictures without problems when rotating the phone. The next step will be feeding the image to IQ engines, in the hope that the result might be useful to search a beer database. (Which might be available as a web service.)

Some time ago the source code of remembeer became available again. I just downloaded it, hoping that beerscan can be built on top of this.

Yesterday I pushed the first bit of beerscan related code to the github repository: https://github.com/johanv/Beerscan. It is code for a stupid Android app, wich doesn't do anything more than showing the camera input to the screen. You have to start somewhere, don't you.

I will soon post a howto for setting up the development environment and for compiling the app on this blog.

Although the functionality is minimal, there is already a bug: when you turn around your phone, the orientation of the captured images is wrong.

I want to try out the image recognition API of IQ Engines for the beer label recognition. Sadly enough this is not a free service, but hey, it has a public API. I will probably create an abstraction layer around this API, so I can easily switch to another image recognition back end later on.

Yet another update about what's happening in ‘Beerscan world’

I managed to build a ‘Hello World program’ using OpenCV. OpenCV is an open source library for computer vision, which might be very interesting for a project for recognizing pictures of beer labels. Especially since there exists an Android port.

The code of the hello world app I built, comes from the OpenCV book, and it's c++ code. Compilation involves cmake, to generate a makefile.

This weekend I talked to some people about beerscan. We had these ideas:

• We don't always want to upload a whole picture to some web service; maybe there is no WIFI, and for 3G the amount of data you may upload/download is restricted. Ideally, an app on the phone can determine some ‘parameters’ of the image, and upload these. Not sure whether this is always feasible.

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