App for physical chess books

Ok, had this random idea today as I was reading a print chess magazine. Let me know if I put this in the wrong forum, but for any one out there with programming skills, how hard would it be to have a mobile app (iOS, Android, etc) that would allow you to take a picture of a chess board in a book, magazine, etc, and set up a board on the device that you could the use from there. So say I'm reading a book my Silman or Fischer, I come to a diagraham, snap a pic with the app, it thinks a minute, sets up the board, and I can input the moves after that to work through the example in the book. Would this even be feasible? There seems to be some very common icons used in such diagrams, could an app be programmed to recognize them?

I am not a programmer anylonger, but even back when I was that sort of recognition wouldn't have been that hard. Pieces have a pretty limited set of shapes (and even adding an app so that you could select shapes to mark as particular pieces wouldn't be that hard) and squares have easily defined edges. 

Frankly, that's a great idea for an app! In all seriousness, run out, hire a lawyer to protect the idea, hire a programmer make it, and get busy. I'd pay ~$10 for that on my iphone, and I bet lots of other people would too. 

I messed around with some algorithm ideas for this in MATLAB a while back. The piece recognition phase isn't that difficult, especially if you 'train' to a particular set or style of pieces. What was a bit harder, perhaps surprisingly, was getting the image of the diagram in an acceptable form for reliable piece detection - correcting for non-squareness and uneven illumination.