tagaprice was an idea of ours around 2010 for a platform where people take a picture of their shopping receipts with their smart phone and have some more or less sophisticated code scan them using OCR and pattern matching to match the (often abbreviated) text lines and prices to actual products.
the idea was to give people a quick and easy way to track their expenses and maybe allow them to count nutritional intake.
at the same time we wanted to create a database of how prices of indiviual products (or product groups) change over time.
Another thing we wanted to visualize is the sometimes extreme differences in pricing of certain product types (around that time I had seen milk in German supermarkets for roughly half the price than the ones back home in Austria).
one idea was to plot a price heat map for individual product types to show that regional difference in price.
we've been working on the project on and off over time (privately as well as in the form of group projects for university), but the main issue we kept running into was the quality of smartphone cameras back then, resulting in less-than-desirable OCR results.
anyway, all of us have moved on since then.
but every now and then we do think back and wonder if the problems we had back in the day would be easier to solve these days.
after all, smartphone cameras have gotten waaaayyyy better both in terms of resolution as well as in their ability to handle low-light situations.
also, the machine learning hype a few years back seems to have had some impact in OCR quality.
well, since you've read this far, I thought I'd reward you with the logo we came up with (honestly, I'm not sure if this was the final one. I kinda feel that there have been other designs...):
feel free to get in touch if you'd like to know more about the project