AI-Powered Lost & Found Management System: A Smart Campus Community Platform

Each semester millions of lost items end up in campus universities. Campus universities are where this happens. These lost personal effects range from important items such as ID cards to textbook to laptops and ear buds. Campus universities has a lost personal effects problem. Existing system where Colleges have been dealing with this issue: a lost items cardboard bin, inquiries at the security desk, physical bulletin boards-are not effective or time consuming and cumbersome for student use. To address this, our team has developed an AI Powered Lost and Found Management System. This paper details the architecture of a mobile application which links the person who has lost items to the person who has found items, along with its technology stack and development process. The frontend was developed in Flutter framework, the NoSQL cloud database we chose was the Firebase NoSQL database. To avoid the use of heavy image recognition models, we have designed an extremely optimized matching algorithm which utilizes NLP and Category filter with Geolocation Data to give us a similarity score of lost and found items. When a match is obtained, the users are automatically notified via Push Notification. Safety is also a top priority: user information is kept confidential until two students have exchanged private messages via the in-app chat application, and we have a QR code validation system so that people can only claim items that they own. Our final system provides a much more efficient, secure, and time effective solution for campus lost and found item management.