From poster to mobile calendar: An event reminder using mobile OCR

Abstract

Technological innovations are the foundation of new services today. Successful services address real-life issues that help people manage life more conveniently using relevant technologies. Currently, images are a part of daily life. People are often taking pictures of different posters for different events as exhibitions, workshops, conferences, etc., with their mobile. Unfortunately, sometimes these pictures are forgotten and events' dates expire. As consequence, people miss events they were interested in. Hence, with the vision to provide technology-powered services, affordable and turnkey applications, this paper presents Event-Reminder, a fully automated lightweight reminder system builds upon a mobile offline OCR (Optical Character Recognition) with touch interaction making some daily tasks easier. Event-Reminder is a mobile application that would recognize the images' text content, extract event's date and venue and upload this event information automatically to mobile calendar in order to remind the user about the event at proper time. A prototype system is introduced in this paper.