AI-Powered Lost and Found Portal for College Campus
Angad Singh
Scholar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, (AI&ML), KIPM College of Engineering and Technology, U.P., India
Sumit Kumar Verma
Scholar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, (AI&ML), KIPM College of Engineering and Technology, U.P., India
Abhay Sahu
Scholar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, (AI&ML), KIPM College of Engineering and Technology, U.P., India
Pankaj Kumar Gupta
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, (AI&ML), KIPM College of Engineering and Technology, U.P., India
📌 DOI: https://doi.org/10.63920/tjths.52032
🔑 Keywords: Lost and found system, AI item matching, convolutional neural networks, real-time notifications, QR code, geolocation
📅 Publication Date: 26 April 2026
📜 License:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Abstract:
Every year, countless students, faculty, and staff across college campuses lose personal belongings — and most of them never get those items back. Traditional lost-and-found systems, whether physical registers, notice boards, or informal WhatsApp groups, simply were not built for the pace and scale of modern campus life. They are slow, hard to search, and offer no intelligent way to connect lost items with found ones. This paper introduces Lost and Found — a full-stack, AI-powered web portal designed to completely rethink how institutions handle lost and found items. Built on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js), the platform uses a TensorFlow.js convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically match photos of lost items with found ones, achieving an 87.3% matching accuracy in real-world trials. Beyond AI matching, the system includes QR code tagging for physical items, GPS-based location tracking, role-based access for different types of users, real-time push notifications via WebSockets, and a live analytics dashboard for administrators. During a 60-day pilot at the Institute of Technology, Lucknow with 200 participants, the portal reduced average item recovery time by 74% compared to the paper-based system, and earned a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 82.4 — placing it firmly in the "Excellent" category
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📖 How to Cite
Sumit Kumar V., Angad S., Abhay s., Asmit Kumar R., Pankaj Kumar G. (2026). AI-Powered Lost and Found Portal for College Campus. TEJAS J. Technol. Humanit. Sci.,, Vol. 05, Issue 02. https://doi.org/10.63920/tjths.52032
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