Pegma

I actively participate in hackathons because they are great opportunities to break the set patterns of a routine life and help me tick off an idea from my ideas repository. One such hackathon was held by Google Developers’ Group, Bangalore as part of Women’s Day celebration in 2016.

I led my team to build Pegma, an Android app that helps book lovers ‘find’ books. The user can click a picture of a bookshelf in a library or book fair and enter the book she is looking for. Pegma identifies and indexes each book in the shelf and performs a text search to reply if the book exists in the shelf or not.

The idea for Pegma strolled into my mind when I was visiting a book sale. The stack of books all around arranged in no specific order obviated the possibility to claim with certainty if the books in my list were available or not.

I designed the interface of the app to focus on capturing the image of a shelf and maintaining an inventory of the shelves that have already been visited and scanned. This speeds up the process of locating another book on the same shelf.

We also adapted the OpenCV algorithm to correctly identify the number of books in the image of a shelf. We are currently working on identifying texts in the image of each book, a feat we could not complete in the 24-hour duration.