Expense Control: A Gamified, Semi-Automated, Crowd-Based Approach For Receipt Capturing

We investigate a crowd-based approach to enhance the outcome of optical character recognition in the domain of receipt capturing to keep track of expenses. In contrast to existing work, our approach is capable of extracting single products and provides categorizations for both articles and expenses, through the use of microtasks which are delegated to an unpaid crowd. To evaluate our approach, we developed a smartphone application based on a receipt analysis and an online questionnaire in which users are able to track expenses by taking photos of receipts, and solve microtasks to enhance the recognition. To provide additional motivation to solve these tasks, we make use of gamification. In a three-week-long user study (N=12), we found that our system is appreciated, that our approach reduces the error rate of captured receipts significantly, and that the gamification provided additional motivation to contribute more and thereby enrich the database.