Slicing and Recognition of book title and author from bookshelf image I am trying, for my own learning purposes, to develop an implementation of an algorithm that would list books, given an image of a bookshelf like the following:



The first step is to slice the image into individual books. 

My algorithm, in Mathematica, is:

    img = ColorConvert[Import["http://i.stack.imgur.com/IaLQk.jpg"], "GrayScale"]



do a basic edge detection &amp;
remove the text and try to keep the long lines

edge = DeleteSmallComponents[EdgeDetect[img, 3],Last[ImageDimensions[img]]/5]

then remove unwanted horizontal lines

lines = Sort[ImageLines[img5] /. {{0., _}, {_, _}} -&gt; Sequence[]]
Show[img, Graphics[{Thick, Orange, Line /@ lines}]]



The results, though, are less than great:



My questions are:


How can I improve this to yield better results?
Is there a smarter way to do this?
how further should I process the images to increase accuracy at the (later) OCR phase?
How to use the color information to improve the segmentation?
Here is the link to a research paper that tries to do the same thing as you wanted. It might help you.using image features
Also a cool video on the youtube