ByteScout Socks Reader Beta – Technology Preview

With years of image analysis expertise with our BarCode Reader SDK (the library for Windows software developers to find and read barcodes from images and PDF documents), we decided to concentrate our efforts help to avoid the headache almost every man on Earth faces: finding a matching pair of socks

And today I’m very proud to show you our new project (still in beta): ByteScout Socks Reader Beta Technology Preview for Apple iPhone!

Before the demonstration we just dropped a bunch of socks after washing into the floor and took a photo of them with our iPhone and opened this photo in ByteScout Socks Reader app:

Clicking Analyze Socks button will start the process by initializing our patent-pending Socks Reader engine:

Then Socks Reader app runs photo image preprocessing (to remove unwanted noise and prepare the image for socks identification)

Next step is to identify every single sock on the image as a separate object:

Then the application performs color analysis for every single sock object and stores information about each single sock in the internal database:

Then Socks Reader uses this information to finally identify and match pairs:

Bingo! The app paired all socks and marked them with numbers:

Now just click OK button and use the map to match socks and sort them into pairs:

Next Steps (before the publiс release):

1) Integrate with Siri (so you could ask Siri: “Oh, how can I find at least one pair of socks?” and this will launch Socks Reader app automatically);
2) Discuss possible licensing of our technology to washing machines vendors to provide built-in socks pairing right into washing machines (through a built-in camera);
3) Manufacturing mechanical hands with iPhone compatible interface to work together with Socks Reader to automate socks sorting as well (so you just plug a mechanical hand into your iPhone, run Socks Reader and the hand and the app will do the rest sorting your socks!);

Public Release Date: 
We plan to release public 1.00 version for iPhone on 01 April 2013 as a free app.

Licensing Model:
Matching first 20 pairs of socks will be free. Next matches will be available as in-app purchases with “socks” credits (you will be able to purchase 10 socks, 20 socks, 100 socks, 1 million socks credits)