State of the Art Analysis - Image Recognition APIs, CamFind

State of the Art Analysis - Image Recognition 

Based on the data gathered from our interviews we came to the conclusion that most people did not have any actual complaints concerning the boat trip. Most people thought the trip was "nice", fast and smooth overall. 

We could not really find a specific issue or request for improvement regarding the boat itself. Therefore we came up with an idea to enhance the boat experience with an application, which would use technology such as GPS and image recognition to give the user information about the different sites sited from the boat during its trip.

My state of the art analysis will focus on image recognition application programming interfaces (APIs), but mainly on the application CamFind, as seen on Youtube.

A quick search using the key word "mobile image recognition" resulted in several different applications available on the market, both live applications and software, most notably APIs. They were, however, not easily accessible as they required registrations, sign ups and licenses. I found this mashape blog listing a couple of image recognition APIs. The first one one the list, CamFind, is available on the App Store and Google Play. CamFind is a visual search engine. It uses pictures taken directly by the user's mobile device to display information about the object among several other features. The following quote is taken directly from their website:

With CamFind, understanding the world around you has never been easier. Simply take a picture of any object and CamFind uses mobile visual search technology to tell you what it is. The CamFind app provides fast, accurate results with no typing necessary. Snap a picture, learn more. That’s it.
It's all powered by our CloudSight image recognition API, so the same technology can be included in your next big idea.

This image recognition API could potentially prove very useful for our own project. We would just have to tweak it to make it suitable for the boat environment and then focus solely on that surrounding area for maximum usablitity.. This clearly shows that our idea in some way is doable with present technology.