Image Recognition for Android/iPhone

Question

I'm looking at developing an app that could benefit from having a image recognition system. I've seen this sort of thing in iPhone and Android apps. Take a picture of a book and the app takes you to Amazon where you can find that book. I'm not looking for general image recognition, but more the ability to pick a single image out of a library of about 10k images.

Any ideas of what services are available for this sort of thing?

Answer 1

Google Goggles does something similar to Amazon Remembers. It uses OCR if text can be identified and they want to use it with the similar image search from Google Images. I think they generate some kind of hash for an image with the feature that if the images are similar the images are similar to.

My best guess would be try to start with the character recognition and do a text search for the title of your card. This means your user has to make a very clear image maybe even in a specific position. But for a first application this would be great already. As somebody playing magic I would buy the tool for trading and cataloging my cards.

Answer 2

Actually, while short of getting an actual Amazon employee to tell you there is no way to confirm this, I am fairly certain that the Amazon Remembers feature you refer to is actually the work of crowd sourcing- using lots of people combing through data to make it appear like a computer is doing it. I think they may actually be using there own Mechanical Turk system.

Edit: Also, I found this SO question that might interest you. It is specifically for playing cards, but some of the answers (such as the machine learning example) can be modified to be more helpful for what you want to do with magic cards.