Senior Design Project - Situation - Need Suggestions

[Nielk1]

During a class that was the precursor for Senior Design, my group started work on an android application that would allow for the management of receipts for taxation and record keeping purposes. It was to feature not only camera use and off-site storage of the data, but also OCR. Sadly, we have not yet found a viable OCR solution for receipts and at this point, an identical software is available that includes all features we intended aside from the OCR.

So, it is time for a new project. I am asking you all for any ideas I might put forward to my group. We need to try to figure this out by class tomorrow night.

Here is a look at past and prospective projects: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/SeniorDesign/
Someone else has told me the older ones look far better than the newer ones, which look 'less useful'.

Any suggestions?

EDIT:
Here is a rough cut of our old Requirement Doc (the precursor class was a tad less strict than Senior Design will be). https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id ... lhw6liFHWs

My group members would prefer an android project because of all we learned working on the last one, but I say, anything.

[HitchcockGreen]

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list

[Nielk1]

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list

Tried that. Tried a ton of them.

[Psychedelic Rhino]

Tossing a line into the mates forum, you must be frantic.

[Nielk1]

Tossing a line into the mates forum, you must be frantic.

Have no idea what so ever what to do.
I basically need an innovative idea.

[Zero Angel]

What about an application that uses connectivity in some way? And by connectivity, I simply mean 'what the device can see'. Whether it be bluetooth, wifi (APs and/or Clients) or cellphone towers? With this in mind, you can combine it with another function.

Like lets say you were to create a picture taking program, and it used this concept to, for example catalogue the pictures taken based on the location it was taken in -- perhaps by GPS, but maybe also by other criteria such as the nearby APs. In this sense, the phone can build a database of locations and points of connectivity. You can then find a use for this data, such as by using mutual connectivity with a computer to map out locations and points of interest in a virtual representation of the locales you visit. The concept can be brought even further through a mutual exchange of this information with other software users who have visited different locales from you. In that sense your phone becomes a tool you can use to collect and automatically categorize the data. On your computer, you can give meaning to this data through some method. Like perhaps if you wrote reviews of restaurants, you would simply take the picture, then once your phone is paired with your computer you would look up some sort of meta-data associated with the picture you took (that the phone would gather based on GPS data, or an index of all nearby sources of connectivity) -- and all other pictures of that nature would also come up. From this, you could expand the database your phone built to a database that uses custom fields or arrays which can further link information to the picture and to other information that is pertinent to the location the picture was taken from.

[Nielk1]

Original future features planned for the OpticRM program had been locations of stores based on either GPS or cell tower to allow for pre-filling of store details.

BTW, ZA, the data collection part you refer to is called Wardriving. There are many existing databases of that information that can be used to find one's location when GPS is not available.

[sabrebattletank]

Make an Android app that takes everyone's Facebook data and submits it to Hunch.

[Zero Angel]

I just thought of a modification of that idea. How about an app that takes the GPS location of a taken picture as well as the timestamp and combines it with map data to form a timeline of certain things like vacations, etc. The program could either create a central database, write things into the EXIF data of the images (either for redundancy, or stand-alone purposes), or use the database+EXIF for storing the aforementioned metadata. Then you could either directly sync the data to a computer or use a cloud-storage solution to create trip logs that can also be combined with a map fetching service to show a visual timeline of the pictures (The cloud-based method could, theoretically, be used to automatically upload and sync the database with other users in real time, since they would be able to retrieve that data). From this point, you have a number of options including creating a computer program to display the timelines, doing so via a web service (ie: Flikr, GMaps), or even by creating a local program to create visual map/time logs of the pictures. Even if that is out-of-scope of your project, it would still provide a way of improving picture meta data, allowing it to be sorted better since it can now use location data as a way to more accurately index photos.

[Nielk1]

There is actually a trip system planned, though more so you can identify business trips for audit.