In cooperation with Innovattic, we are creating a mobile application for the Dutch Police which will be part of the Stop Heling project. This project aims to decrease the sales of stolen goods by allowing people to register the serial numbers of their (electronic) belongings. When police officers come across goods of unknown origin, it will be easy for them to see whether these goods have been reported stolen and to return them to their owners.

VanAI will be developing the image analysis part of an app that will allow people to automatically scan serial numbers of their belongings using barcodes or through OCR (text recognition) on the actual serial number. The app needs to be available for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, posing several developent challenges.

All code on the iPhone needs to be written in its own Objective-C language; Android supports C++ code (through Java Native Interfaces), while the BlackBerry gives you no other choice but to develop in plain Java. Through rapid prototyping in all environments, contant thorough unit testing and frequent code refactoring we will ensure that a single base code set will be easily portable to all three environments.

The second reason why this project is interesting is the fact that a typical OCR algorithm (which works by segmenting characters and applying a battery of classifiers (like neural networks) to classify each character) requires a lot of CPU, more than is available on a mobile phone. We will thus have to rethink the entire approach and create our own proprietary OCR implementation.

For VanAI this project will be a first venture into the domain of mobile applications. This has till now been a semi-deliberate choice based on my own believe that in the (near) future we’ll be moving towards a more interconnected way of computations; I believe that apps will at some point not run on your phone anymore, but on some advanced computational “grid” (you’ve probably heard the term “Cloud computing” before). Unfortunately it’s still going to take a few years before we can enjoy WIFI quality internet access anywhere we go, so at the moment we’re forced to bring the intelligence to the phones rather than connecting the phones to an intelligence grid.

As part of a recent project ( more info ) VanAI has created an SDK for barcode reading and text recognition using proprietary algorithms. There are several commercially available solutions with similar functionality, but we believe our implementation offers some strategic advantages:

• Multi-platform support thanks to implementation in C and Java. Runs on nearly anything; Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS (iPhone), Android, BlackBerry, smart cameras (e.g. Axis).
• The architecture was created with mobile platforms in mind and is thus very fast and uses little resources.
• Market leading OCR products are expensive and using their products as part of your own solution requires complex negotiations with large companies.

By using this already developed SDK, we can create custom applications quickly and at low costs, including application for mobile platforms (in cooperation with our partner Innovattic)

You may also use this SDK as part of your own application; all types of licencing models are open for negotiation.