Comparing two images(Book Spines) and recognize

Question

I am creating an android application to recognize book in a library. What I do is I will take a image of the book spine of a book and send it to a server to do the image process there and recognize the book from a database and send the details about the book to the phone or if book is not there, it will recognize the optical characters and send it to the mobile application. I am hoping to do the image processing process using C#. The book recognition is done using a template image comparing which are in the database with the sent image. So I need some help figuring out what would be the best approach to do this. I have already researched on some methods such as

1. Template matching
2. Pattern recognition
3. feature recognition

I want to know when it comes to images like books what would be the recommended method which I better follow. And Is there any good APIs for this. I have researched on OpenCV but want to know if there are better APIs. And how can I use OCR when recognizing the book. I want application to be fast. Normally when we compare two book spines(template and image) if i get 60% of similarities I can assume its the same book. So I am searching for the optimal way...! Help me out with this...!

Answer 1

While I have limited knowledge in the field of image processing, there is a library which offers such facilities: AForge.NET. That might be good as a starting reference.

EDIT: for an introductory explanation of the theory behind image processing, this may also offer some guidance: http://www.societyofrobots.com/programming_computer_vision_tutorial.shtml

Answer 2

I understand that you are looking for some API or "already-built" image processing library to help you with this, but this answer might help you in a way, or other people who want to pursue something like this.

There are some pretty helpful research papers (including tests from successful implementations) on this Mobile Visual Search page at Stanford. Check out the heading "Book Spine Recognition for Asset Tracking" on that page.