Development of an artificial intelligent agent for library hard materials distribution operations

Abstract

In recent years, automation has emerged as a technological solution that is gaining grounds across various fields. The task of managing updates like sorting, shelving and documenting large collections of books in the shortest possible time is stressful with limited personnel and can be automated. Other important library tasks such as consultation can, therefore, be undertaken effortlessly. This paper which explores the use of automated solutions for the purpose of book sorting in libraries, proposes the You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) model to detect books, then performs optical character recognition using EasyOCR on the detected book. After the characters have been extracted, the system then classifies the book into its respective library section using OpenAI. The result from testing the system shows that the book detection model gave an accuracy of 74%, the EasyOCR performed with an accuracy of 91% with variations across different image formats. For simplicity, images used were stored in jpg formats for faster execution time and easy processing. The paper emphasizes the revolutionary impact of AI and machine vision in educational institutions, especially in libraries beyond what can be imagined, pushing for the formation of library robots. This project's benefits include object detection and intelligent book categorization which phase to a new direction for study and advances library automation technologies that boost education.