Inspiration
Owen was in a fancy restaurant and didn't understand many parts of a menu. He spent a lot of time typing and googling individual words and eventually came to a conclusion that there must be a better way.
What it does
Foodie takes an image of a menu item and converts it into text. it then translates and puts the words into layman's terms so that you can go to fancy restaurants without a worry of ordering something gross.
How we built it
- we used javascript media streams to camputer the video input from the camera
- We used flask and AWS / GOOGLE apis in the backend
- We used jquery and javascript
Challenges we ran into
- we had to run the public facing domain on HTTPS otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to access the camera.
- sending the image and converting it from base64 to bytes took time
- working with multiple APIs like AWS-DetectText, Google-Translate, and Google-Image Search
- building a registry of culinary words and there descriptions required web-scraping from multiple sources and immense formatting of text
- design choices in a rushed timeline proved to be difficult
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- we finished
What we learned
- video streams and taking of snapshots of them with javascript
- Optical character recognition
What's next for Foodie
We may consider building a better web app, creating a mobile app on a platform such as Cordova, attaining a better domain name and implementing better practices. We are very proud of what we have created and will keep the production service running.
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