Bus Route Information Retrieval through Visual Codes Using Camera Enabled Cellphones

City buses are a cheap and convenient way of commutation around the globe. Such buses have identification numbers which determine the route of the bus round the city. These identification numbers are known to the daily local commuters of the bus service, but are a great problem for outstation tourists who are not aware of the bus numbers. In some cases the bus route itself is printed on the bus, this in most cases is again in the local language of that place and is hence a problem for the outstation tourists due to the language barrier. In this paper we present a system to overcome this situation. We propose to encode the bus identification number of a bus in 2-dimensional visual codes. These visual codes can be easily be either printed on the buses or on the bus stops. Further we develop a mobile application that uses the embedded camera of the cell phone to snap a picture of such a visual code. The image taken is then processed on the cell phone itself to retrieve the bus identification number from the visual code which is then sent to the server device ( through a text message) containing the database of bus route of all the buses. The server device looks up the database for the bus route information corresponding to the received bus identification number received and sends it back to the client cell phone through a text message.