Oct 02, 2014
Catchoom Team
Android, CraftAR, developer, Image Recognition, iOS, mobile app, SDK, Wearables
Ever wanted to connect your physical assets with your digital ones? At Catchoom, we make that possible by adding this functionality into your new or existing mobile app. The magic is called Image Recognition SDK and is available for iOS, Android and wearables like Glass.
In just three steps, your app will connect your world to your digital business.
The Image Recognition SDK is Catchoom’s dedicated Image Recognition software development kit for Android v2.3 and above, iOS and wearables like Google Glass.
This lightweight SDK is designed to let developers focus on the user interface and experience, while Catchoom takes care of the technology behind the scenes.
Features:
– Customizable camera preview.
– Scan and capture in two different modes:
Single shot mode: Takes a picture (upon your request) and sends a single query to the Cloud Image Recognition API provided by CraftAR.
Finder mode: Continuously sends pictures to CraftAR in the cloud and recognises objects appearing in the field of view. You can start and stop the process programmatically.
– Parses the Image Recognition API responses from the server.
There are several reasons for this:
In order to provide Augmented Reality experiences, the Augmented Reality SDK from Catchoom tracks objects in 3D as well as renders complex scenes. All of this happens at a high frame rate to provide good user experiences. Not all devices in the market have such level of performance.
For Image Recognition experiences on the other hand, the important part happens at the beginning. In general, the experiences are not that computationally demanding once the object is recognized.
Finally, there are certain devices, such as Glass or smartwatches that are not meant for full-fledged AR experiences, while with the Image Recognition SDK we can provide compelling services (see Shopping with Image Recognition on Glass in our Youtube channel).
At Catchoom, we think that either we should provide high quality experiences or we should not provide them at all.
The Tracking and Rendering modules of the Augmented Reality SDK require an SDK with a larger size on disk. On the other hand, the Image Recognition SDK is much smaller.
Where apps do not require Augmented Reality, we think it is better to make that app weigh as little as possible.
Believe it or not, there are still Android 2.3 devices out there. Those devices cannot be upgraded because the hardware does not support it.
Since Android 2.3 doesn’t have the most recent API advances, we recently stopped providing support for Augmented Reality on Android below version 3.0.
At Catchoom, we didn’t want those users to stop getting great offline-online interactions, and that is why we decided to provide the Image Recognition SDK by Catchoom.