Inspiration
We were inspired by the lack of smart organization in gategroup for simple tasks such as managing expiry dates so that food can be thrown out before it becomes a risk.
What it does
Our system uses AI and Image Recognition to send alerts when expiry dates are close, it also uses databases provided by gategroup to match expiry dates with the pictures taken in our WebApp.
How we built it
We built our system using React for the frontend and a Node.js/Express backend connected to Google Cloud Vision and Gemini 2.5 Flash through secure https. The React app captures images from a live camera feed, sends them to the backend via a continuous OCR loop, and Gemini extracts structured data like expiration dates)from noisy or real-world labels in real time.
Challenges we ran into
The lack of time and data was a VERY big challenge for us, as we lost 13 hours with no datasets and could only do little progress with no tests. We also found some issues while trying to use http instead of https.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of being able to set up secure https communication so the camera would work on mobile devices, as well as having acheived real-time OCR + AI reasoning from a live camera stream.
What we learned
We learned how to connect Google Vision and Gemini APIs in one processing pipeline and we saw how big the importance of model versioning and prompt design is for consistent AI outputs.
What's next for FTR
We hope to expand beyond date detection to analyze full product labels and most importatly add a multilingual OCR pipeline for Spanish/English text.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.