nangs / instant-book-reviewer

An android application which app which can give real time reviews from internet by simply capturing image of a book’s cover.

Instant-Book-Reviewer

An android application which app which can give real time reviews from internet by simply capturing image of a book’s cover.

Why i develop it

When I am buying book (usually as a gift) I need to go through titles I never heard about. It's quite difficult to decide which one is good. Would be great if I can just take a picture of the cover with my mobile phone and it would instantly show me real time reviews from the readers. Could also show availability in different stores too.

In case of this problem, Book Judge(Name of the app) can give the review of the scanned book real time from Goodreads.com which is well known site to book lovers.

Platform

• Android

Minimun SDK version

• 3.0 (HoneyComb, API 11)
  

N.B: I run this app in lolipop(Android 5.0). But i don't know if it will work in Marshmallow(Android 6.0)

Features

• Customized camera activity using surface view
• Get real time reviews by capturing image of book-cover
• Also get reviews by typing book name
• Along with reviews user can get full description of the book provided by Goodreads.com
• Can add a book to read-list which user can use later for further purposes

Used Libraries

• Tesseract
• Opencv

Workflow

• User can capture picture of book cover through Book Judge and it can get text from the captured image using Google Tesseract.
• Then i have used OpenCV, before detecting text via Tesseract for improving the quality.
• Actually we are getting reviews from Goodreads.com which is quite popular to the book-lovers.

App design

Home Page	Take photo using camera	Getting XML data from Goodreads.com

Book Description	Reviews	Buy Online

Search by book title	ReadList

Limitations

• Only detect English language.
• Sometimes Google Tesseract’s performance is very poor.