Inspiration

🎒 Lost & Found Portal – UMT

A web-based Lost & Found Portal designed to help students and staff at the University of Management and Technology (UMT) report, find, and claim lost items efficiently and securely.

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🧩 Problem Statement

Students often misplace personal belongings such as ID cards, water bottles, USB drives, and notebooks across campus. This system provides a centralized platform to report, search, and recover lost and found items while ensuring transparency and accountability.

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🚀 Features

🔐 User Authentication

• Sign up/login with university email (@umt.edu.pk only)
• Role-based access: Students, Admin

📝 Lost & Found Posting

• Post lost/found item with image, location, category, description
• Date picker and image upload

🔎 Item Listings

• Separate Lost and Found pages
• Filter by category, location, and date
• Responsive UI for desktop and mobile

🔁 Claim Request System

• Claim a found item securely
• Notifications to the finder via dashboard or email

🧠 AI Matching (MobileNetV2 + Flask)

• Upload an image of a lost item
• AI recommends visually similar found items using MobileNetV2 and cosine similarity
• Flask API handles the feature extraction and comparison logic

💬 Real-Time Chat (Optional)

• In-app secure chat between item finder and claimer

📊 Dashboards

• User dashboard: View your posts and requests
• Admin dashboard: Moderate posts, resolve claims, archive items

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🧠 AI Matching Overview

Model Used: MobileNetV2
Backend: Flask API
Similarity Metric: Cosine similarity on image embeddings
Usage:

• Image uploaded → features extracted using MobileNetV2 → compared to stored embeddings of found items → similar items suggested

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	HTML, CSS, Tailwind, JavaScript
Backend	PHP (core logic & DB handling)
Database	MySQL
AI Service	Python, Flask, MobileNetV2

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📁 Folder Structure

├── assets/                  # Assets folder containing css, js
│   └── css
        |-  landing.css           
│   └── js
        |-  landing.js                 
├── php/                    # Backend PHP logic
├── img/                    # images used in project
├── sql                     # Containing db
├── uploads                 # Images uploaded from users (lost & found)
├── views                   # Containing view files


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## ⚙️ Setup Instructions

### 1. Web Application (PHP)
- Place the project in `htdocs` if using XAMPP.
- Set your MySQL credentials in `db.php`.
- Ensure your Apache and MySQL services are running.

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## ✅ Completed Functionalities
- Implement real-time chat using Ajax
- Authentication with univeristy allowed email only (@umt.edu.pk).

Students can
- Add found items.
- See lost items.
- Can request for its lost item.
- Can approve request of found items.
- Can chat with each other.

Admin  can
- Archrive/ Unarchive the post.
- Resolve the post.

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## What it does

## How we built it

## Challenges we ran into

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

## What we learned

## What's next for UMT LOST and Found

Built With

• php