ML Powered Social Media E-Commerce App
Overview 💡😂
Selling pre-owned cars is a hassle in this day and age, whether you're thinking of taking up a deal on Craigslist or considering going to a used car dealership in-person. Now, with the introduction of CIM, you can now do this in the comfort of your living room couch--COVID-friendly!
We built a web-based version for simple users who don't want to use the social media feature, and a separate iOS and Android version for people who want to use the social media feature and see what other cars are on the market!
With a simple snapshot, you can now get all the info you need to make smart purchases or sales of any used vehicle. Additionally, we provide a social media platform like Venmo so that you can see what other cars are on the market so you can buy a different car if you'd like! Using labeling and OCR powered by the Google Cloud Vision suite, we are able to instantly provide users with info about a vehicle in question, including:
- Automobile Make, Model, Year, and Submodel
- Current Market Price for used cars of that model
- Major Accident/Salvage History of the specific vehicle
- Issued Recalls and Manufacturer Warnings affecting the vehicle
How we built it 🛠️😳
- Frontend: Web-app takes user input images, pipes them to the backend/vehicle recognition scripts (python), then accepts and displays outputs to the user (vehicle's specifications and price range)
- Backend: Python implementation of the Google CV/OCR suites to detect and interpret license plate/general car image capture; sends feedback to the Edmunds API to retrieve vehicle's specifications and price range
Challenges we ran into 😖🌩️
- Sometimes, OCR wouldn't detect license plate information 100% accurately when presented with test images (namely, the "California" located at the upper part of the plate would not be detected as "California")
- We originally wanted to implement machine learning to detect certain types of damages to the vehicle based on the input image (which would affect the price range to a more specific extent) but it had to be dropped due to time and difficulty implementing it with the front end
Accomplishments that we're proud of 😏👍
We successfully reached the degree of functionality we had envisioned for CIM.
What we learned 🤔💭
Hacking is temporary but memes are forever. Our CARLMAX company chairman, Charles W. Heizer, is not a force to be reckoned with.
What's next for CIM 👴🧓
We would want to implement a social media feature where we can interact with other car sellers to negotiate trades of used cars, and suggest similar cars or cars people have traded before.
Built With
- beautiful-soup
- css
- django
- edmunds
- flask
- google-cloud-vision
- javascript
- python
- react
- requests
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