Buyers Guide Simplified

Test Image!

Inspiration

A few months ago, I was shopping for a used car and I noticed that the buyers guides had a specific formatting to them. It can be tedious to research a car manually, plus one should want to be discreet and into show to much interest in the car they want.

What it does

I had the idea to make an app where you take a picture of the buyers guide and it pulls up the cars history report. Alternatively, you can manually input the vin number to pull up the report.

How I built it

OpenCV to detect the edges of the buyers guide and transform the picture into a scan of the document. TesseractOCR to extract text from the scan. Flask to make the program web accessible.

Challenges I ran into

OCR is pretty garbage. Characters can be confused when scanning a document especially with there is glare and noise in the image. Finding a free and open source car history report lookup. In the end, I just made an example page.