HACKER Q&A
📣 ThinkBeat

I want “Hey AI find duplicates of books on my shelf


I have a diverse collection of books and sometimes it is joined by another collection and another. My system for keeping it all straight has failed. I have taken a couple of photos of my shelves.

Now I wish to give the AI the photos and ask it to find duplicates.

(Now the back of the book might be a different color, or a different font and so on)

Ideally it will understand and attempt to guess the edition and all that as well.

Is there one out there that can do it?

I have had problems finding one that accepts pictures as input to questions.

  👤 shortrounddev2 Accepted Answer ✓
Book barcodes are usually the ISBN number for the book. You can just scan the barcodes on the books and check for duplicates of the ISBN. If different editions have different ISBNs, you can use google books API for free to look up metadata about the books (title, author, etc.) for similarity. AI isn't necessary for this
👤 brucethemoose2
> I have had problems finding one that accepts pictures as input to questions.

You dont want a question answering llm, you want a OCR app that can parse text from images.

👤 PaulHoule
Image similarity isn't hard

https://sbert.net/examples/applications/image-search/README....

and might work for two books that have the same cover, but I wouldn't expect it to work for books that have different covers.

👤 mikece
I would rather have an "AI" find duplicates of files across all of my computers and NAS drives, and other hard drives as plugged into a computer on the network.
👤 superchroma
Segment them with OpenCV and find the titles with OCR?