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.

Three steps: Upload Images. Set Content. Add SDK.

In just three steps, your app will connect your world to your digital business.

1. As a user you need to upload the images of the objects, packaging, pages in a magazine or posters to the CraftAR service.
2. For each item, you can set a URL to point directly to a demonstration video, a product page in your eCommerce site, or a mobile coupon, for instance. The possibilities are endless and we’re right here to help you get the gears moving.
3. Finally, tell your mobile developer to add the Image Recognition SDK to your app and connect it to your account. In just a few steps your app will become actionable!

What’s in our CraftAR Image Recognition SDK?

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.

Why two separate SDKs?

There are several reasons for this:

More devices than ever before

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.

Smaller impact of SDK size in your app

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.

More versions of Android supported

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.

Want to know more?

Read the technical docs for iOS and Android
or

Download iOS SDK

Download Android SDK