22 February 2008

DAEM develops image recognition
technologies for mobile phones

When you see an interesting or unknown object in the physical world, you’ll most probably want to know the corresponding information in the “digital format”. Depending on the object you would like to get information like its price, user comments, phone number, historically information, there are really many different solutions.

Image recognition is historically related to bar code of course, but using a picture of the object is very convenient and very easy to deploy. The usability is as easy as taking an image with a camera phone.

Image recognition is the process by which a picture is analyzed by a computer program to recognize certain elements, be it a face, writings or simply patterns in the image.

DAEM technology allowing users to capture images of products, adverts or logos to immediately receive relevant information on their mobile handsets, creating interactivity between users and advertisers.

This technology powers a service allowing the user to take a picture of an item with their cell phone and automatically get information on the product itself and where to purchase it. When the user locates a promo he takes a picture of the advertisement or logo and sends the image to a short-code or e-mail address. Deam’s image recognition technology identifies the image and sends related multimedia contents back to the user.

The system can be used to take part in promotions, buy tickets to a show, and download contents, access consumer reviews…mobile visual searches are most efficient way to obtain information on demand. Users receive promotions, contents and information on demand just by snapping an image of a advertisement campaign.

The company Daem Interactive has developed a native Symbina application Skuair for S60 3rd edition phones and offered it to limited number of beta testers. Application works just fine on my Nokia N95 and there is also a nice video demonstration that shows the using the Skuair on the Nokia N80.

Skuair is a client-server solution that merges the best qualities of 2d barcodes and image recognition technologies.

Research in the fields of augmented reality and low-res image recognition combine in a fast, scalable and easy to use solution.

Skuair is actually a second-generation 2d code. It can contain any logo or personalized image. Unlike 2Dcodes, individual tags are easy to remember because they are images, not secretive machine only readable bar-codes.

There is no doubt that Image recognition technology is very promising and whole concept reminds me on the Nokia's Point & Find technology introduced few months back on the Nokia World in Amsterdam and I am really excited about further product based on this techonolgy.

Nokia's Point & Find lets people point a camera phone at an object or picture and find out more about it or buy it just by clicking once when its name comes up on the screen.

Thank you Oscar for the heads up ;)

More info at:
http://daeminteractive.com/